We Built This City

Every once in a while I draw great guilty pleasure from a truly awful song. Case in point this morning -- We Built This City. Terrible in ways almost too numerous to count -- the monotonous music, the laughable arrogance (built this city? Come on, we're talking about San Francisco here, 60 years recovered from a devastating earthquake before Jefferson Airplane ever first flew.), the name calling at corporate mediocrity when corporate mediocrity defines Starship in its precipitous and endless decline from the joyous Airplane days a couple decades earlier in the Fillmore Ballroom. Listen to the lyrics and add to this list.

But, but...although my iTunes version sadly doesn't have it, in one of the many versions of WBTC, there is a spliced in voiceover of an anonymous (to me at least) SF dj from the glory days of KYA or KFRC AM Top Forty and every time I hear that I am thrown back to all those sunny Sixties days driving across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley into San Francisco and the wonder of what-comes-next.



And even more, in Buenos Aires, 1984-85, when WBTC would unexpectedly show up on Argentine radio, and I'd grab the then baby Joe, toss him up into the air, singing along, changing "city" to "baby" in the lyrics, and Joe laughing in that "this is scary, this is great" way that babies have before they discover that the laws of gravity rule them as well. It's about where Ellison is now.