When Grace Slick called ‘We Built This City’ the “worst song ever”
A psychedelic pioneer and one of the definitive figures of the counterculture, Grace Slick has led a life of mythical proportions. The songwriter of one of her era’s ultimate anthems, ‘White Rabbit’, it seems appropriate that the mind behind such a fantastical track would have a life of an unbelievable essence.
Known for her outspoken nature, Slick has lived a life of such an oscillating nature that, as well as being the vibrant frontwoman of San Francisco dynasty Jefferson Airplane, she can also claim to have had an armed stand-off with the police. Furthermore, her two regrets in life clearly outline the wild kind of adventures she’s had: never riding a horse and never screwing Jimi Hendrix.
Concentrating on the music, without Grace Slick’s efforts in her heyday, the counterculture would have been without some of its most quintessential music and the psychedelic genre, missing the tangible mysticism that is now a central feature. Demonstrating its effect, a slowed-down version of ‘White Rabbit‘ was used in the trailer for The Matrix Resurrections, denoting the reach of its otherworldly essence.
However, like with her personal life, not all of Grace Slick’s music has been as lauded as ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’. The most derided of the lot came when Slick was in the Jefferson Starship continuation – the follow-up to Jefferson Airplane in itself – Starship. This is the 1985 number-one hit, ‘We Built This City’, a track widely deemed as a creative failure.
The song was written by the celebrated songwriters Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, who lived in Los Angeles at the time. It was initially intended to lament that many of the city’s live music clubs had shut down. Yet, despite the quality of the songwriters and the message behind it, like many people, Grace Slick hates ‘We Built This City’, and once called it the “worst song ever”.
She told Vanity Fair in 2012: “I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the ’80s, which is a bizarre decade to be sober in. So I was trying to make it up to the band by being a good girl. Here, we’re going to sing this song, ‘We Built This City on Rock & Roll’. Oh, you’re shitting me, that’s the worst song ever.”
“We built this city on rock and roll? There isn’t any city built on rock and roll,” she later told Uncut. “If you’re talking about LA, that’s built on oranges and oil and the movie industry. San Francisco, that’s built on gold and trade. New York that’s been around way longer than rock and roll.”
“Bernie Taupin wrote the songs about clubs closing in LA,” Slick added. “But clubs are not going to close forever in a city like LA. So it was a pretty stupid song. And anyway, everybody thought we were bragging about San Francisco, which we weren’t. We had three songs that went to number one in the ’80s. I didn’t believe the lyrics of any of them.”
Listen to ‘We Built This City’ below.
