Unknown Soldier

I heard "We Built This City" on the radio again just the other day and I love that song as much now as when I first heard it back in 1985 and I love the Knee Deep in the Hoopla album as well

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I will certainly not dismiss anyone for liking it. The beat was very 80's, the anthem quality was BIG (fist waving level 11!), Grace and Micky's voices blended very well, and it does have that Baseball Stadium quality to it. I can understand others liking it for a lot of the right reasons. Maybe I should have chose "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now", the theme to Mannequin that was just as cheesy and without that crowd pleasing attitude, but "We Built This City" was something I chose on memory and gut reaction.

Me and my friend also made fun of other songs that went Boom WHACK boom boom WHACK in The 80's like one I kind of like myself, George Harrison's version of "I Got My Mind Set On You", which had a nice laid back quality that fitted his singing even if it was not one of his true highlights that was without the robotic edge and clumsy video that made me single out Starship's hit.

The choice is all of a personal one - it kind of hurt to see a once-idealistic band with a line up only featuring of one from their 60's lineups (Grace Slick) go into MTV style mechanisms (in fact Les Garland was on it!) at a perfect time when I was finally going out in the world and finding that the Pop Culture of that time was really going down with a style that was not all that attractive to me. True, there were already years of Jefferson Starship that slightly were worrying (especially when it got to Freedom at Point Zero), but it was the tip of the iceberg.

butthead aka 216

Neapolitan

Just your run of the mill 80s Metal. Not the worst, but pretty bad imo... it's a crappy crap song.

Sammy Hagar - I Can't Drive 55

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Unknown Soldier

"Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" is a far better choice for 'worst' as the song is the perfect example of a commercial effort that doesn't have any songcraft to it. For the record the Knee Deep in the Hoopla album was by and large the only really good thing that Jefferson Starship and Starship put out, which was a real pity really considering the talent on offer there.

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Come to think of it, at lest there was a fake rebellion in "We Built..." (co-composed via Bernie Taupin) which was a 100 score in the annoying 80's Pop sweepstakes.
Out of that Post-Kantner era, Love Among the Cannibals (I think that was actually Post-Slick!) certainly screamed Cut Out from day one of it's release.

To those with the morbid curiosity wanting to find out what we're discussing here, this is the video in all of it's anti-glory - the band looking like an anonymous 80's musicians dancing around sets made up to look perfect for the Mannequin film it was hyping and Grace and Mickey jumping around synching to the song - better dress sense, but not as amusing to look at. There's no soul to be found here, and I even wonder of Grace was hiding her real feelings during the video shoot. It's more like a corporate anthem that sounds like any "we will succeed" presentation of the day instead of being an actual song. This was co-written by 80's songwriter star Dianne Warren just to give you a warning.

To think that a decade before this, the name Jefferson was connected to the word Airplane and without any fears of any future line up of them turning out songs more befitting of Jem and the Holograms.

Unknown Soldier

Yep Grace Slick had left before that album and to be fair by that time Jefferson Starship/Starship and certainly gone past their sell by date. In fact the glory years of AOR had long gone, despite the fact that mediocre artists like Richard Marx were still making it viable.

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Trollheart

Ah no no no! What about "Sara"? Love that song. And "Nothing's gonna stop us now". Go on, sue me...

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Unknown Soldier

So another Starship fan

Now Jefferson Starship/Starship were something of an enigma, because by and large their worst material of which they've garnered their bad name, is their most overly commercial stuff such as the two you've mentioned above, But hidden away on their albums are some really good deeper sounding material of which the second is quite haunting. Both tracks are from completely different eras of the band but both hark back to their classic Jefferson Airplane days in very different ways.

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Nope...I'm not going to laugh on that level either (you know I have a LOT of guilty pleasures).

Actually, I will have something nice (if not positive) to say about "Sara". That song seriously captured what I call Delorian Pop, something I can call after the infamous John Delorian - the slick 80's answer to the 50's Cadillac cruising music but the Yuppie version instead of the Rock and Roll Rebel. Driving that car with your date, after hitting the neon-filled nightclub, drinking the wine coolers, and going to your well kept home or apartment. No mess here, just shiny chrome and well-produced sounds (no distortion). Pure Early CD era music, with the Grace and Micky (more focus on Mickey) team possibly at their best - which is not saying much in my world, but at least for the FM Stereos everywhere.

I don't like that song, but it did capture a feeling that was not as annoying as either "We Built..." or "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now."