Marconi Plays The Mamba

I wanted to write about Interpol today, but unfortunately a jingle lodged in my ear.
"Marconi plays the mamba" from what Blender deemed the worst song of all time.

Starship's "We Built This City"

Readers, feel free to visit another site now. And I apologize for bringing this one up, but as Stuck On Loop pledges, we examine the music that we can't get out of our head. Good and bad.

I'll sum this up for younger readers. Jefferson Starship was a counterculture '60s band that sang about drug use ("White Rabbit") and lust ("Somebody to Love") amongst other rock and roll topics. Then, creative differences and drug use sank the band. But like so many bands of the '60s, they cleaned up their act and like so many '60s figures of the '80s, found a way to make gobs of money in the Reagan era. They changed their name a few times. Added some synth. And threw in some American jingoism at the height of Rambo/Rocky mania.

The song purports to be a celebration of the rebellious spirit of rock and roll, but it couldn't be further from the truth. As Jefferson Airplane stemmed from San Francisco, "We Built This City", according to songwriter Bernie Taupin, was about Los Angeles. Grace Slick, once the face of the counterculture, was now mugging in front of the camera, '80s perm and all. As Blender aptly sums up the song, it sounds like it was written in a lab.

Driving home today, desperate to get the song out of my head, I thought of an episode of House. In the episode, one of the doctors said a patient's levels were only off by one percent. House shoots back "If her DNA was off by one percent, she'd be a dolphin."

Which, inevitably gets me back to "We Built This City." We know how much this song sucks, but I'm all about finding some sort of raw material to salvage in the garbage heap. For this song, it's one, amazingly stupid, but towering chorus: "Marconi plays the mamba." Forget the rest. Just keep that phrase. It's amazingly stupid, but it has a towering buildup that would make Oasis envious. It's also a phrase stupid enough to get a pass by AC/DC. Hell, if AC/DC used that line in a song about building a city out of rock and roll, critics would call them brilliant.

The other salvageable item of the song is the premises of building a city out of rock and roll. Strip away the keyboards, the sanitized vocals, and the amazingly hypocritical anti-corporation spiel, transport Los Angeles to the depressed city of Detroit and you've got a basis of a song that blues worshipers The White Stripes or The Black Keys could have penned.

But you can't strip away the gloss from Starship's song. It made them a ton of money. And for all its awfulness and its representation of all things that sucked in the '80s, it still serves a purpose. Kids, if you're lucky enough to make a living with your art, keep your head on straight or you may have to resort to writing a song like this to pay the bills.