Starship — We Built This City

JUL 01 1985 · 12:00

Starship — We Built This City (1985) Director: Francis Delia Era: MTV Corporate Rock Peak (1985–1986) — the moment when former underground and psychedelic-era artists (Jefferson Starship spun off from Jefferson Airplane) had fully adapted to high-gloss MTV-programmable production, Top-40 AOR crossover, and the new commercial vocabulary of the Reagan era Exceptionally high — polarizing cultural status, canonical #1 hit, primary-source document of MTV-era commercial rock and the Jefferson lineage's corporate endpoint. Includes a direct vocal appearance by Les Garland, then MTV Executive VP of Programming, on the song's spoken bridge — an unusually direct instance of network leadership appearing audibly inside the product on their own channel. Context: The Starship lineage traces back through Jefferson Starship (1974–1984) to Jefferson Airplane (1965–1972), a band that had been a defining act of the San Francisco psychedelic movement and the Summer of Love. By 1985, the Airplane-to-Starship rebrand had shed the counterculture associations almost entirely — surviving members Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas now fronted a high-gloss commercial act. 'We Built This City' became the flashpoint for retrospective critical debates about that transformation, routinely cited in 'worst songs of all time' lists from the late 1990s onward. The song's spoken bridge — with Les Garland's DJ voiceover — reads as self-aware commentary on rock radio's commercialization, though the song simultaneously enacts the phenomenon it describes. The fact that an MTV programming executive, Garland, provided the voice gave the recording a built-in self-reference: the network programming the song also spoke inside it. Bernie Taupin reportedly wrote the lyric imagining Los Angeles radio's corporatization; producers, who included veteran MTV programmer voices in their circle, recruited Garland for the bridge. It remains one of the most commercially successful and critically contested singles of the MTV era. Director notes: Delia's video for 'We Built This City' exemplifies the mid-1980s MTV-ready clip: rapid-cut performance footage of the band intercut with stylized urban imagery across multiple American cities, neon signage, and a narrative radio-DJ interlude during the song's spoken bridge. The DJ voiceover — delivered by Les Garland, then MTV's Executive Vice President of Programming and a former radio DJ — was recorded separately and dropped into the mix, a rare instance of an MTV executive appearing audibly inside a song on his own network. Garland's bridge lines — 'Looking out over that Golden Gate Bridge on another gorgeous sunny Saturday, and I'm seeing that city by the bay… the city that rocks… the city that never sleeps' — reference San Francisco, Cleveland, and New York respectively, a triangulation that expanded the song from its San Francisco origin (Jefferson Starship's home city) into a pan-American radio-rock anthem.