Never understood the hate for that Starship track, can someone clue me in? I mean the lyrics are tacky, but the tune itself is alright.
Late to the party, but here's $0.02 from an old fart.
Starship was formed by members of Jefferson Starship, which was the rebranded group Jefferson Airplane.
When they were Airplane, they were one of the pioneering groups of the San Francisco music scene in the 60s. They had to fight corporate decency rules to keep their lyrics the way they wrote them, and were early proponents of "lyrics are an integral part of every song and not subject to change," which helped many groups to take a stand forcing record companies to stop trying to dictate what a group did. "Creativity" and "profit" became opposite sides of the music industry, and Airplane was always at the front of that discussion.
Songs like White Rabbit and Somebody to Love pushed the early "Psychedelic Rock" genre into the mainstream, and Airplane became sort of a "fuck the system" poster child.
Years later, when "We built this city" came out, it became a big commercial success. Unfortunately, every single part of that song was garbage as compared to their original sound, their original creativity, and their original message.
Claiming "We built this culture of musicianship over corporate greed," while performing a song that was obviously an attempt to capitalize on that old image but was also written to capitalize on the electronic pop sound of the day, made that song the polar opposite of what that group became famous for.
Obviously selling out creativity while claiming "we built the rock genre" made them the worst example of corporate sell-outs.
By the late 90s, their fans had bailed on them, and they were reduced to performing at malls and street fairs, one step away from leaving a guitar case opened on stage for collecting quarters from passers-by in front of starbucks. Unfortunately, they relied on keyboards and synths and keytars for their music, so they may not have any guitar cases any more.
The stupid arrogance of the lyrics mostly. A bunch of drugged out ex-hippies (who hadn't had a hit in decades) saying "we wuz engineers and construction workers". It's also formulaic rock of the 80s with an annoying chorus.
Ah, makes sense. I never took the lyrics too seriously, they were too ridiculous and larpy, so I thought they were ironic about it.
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