Hindsight Breeds Contempt

Even though it gets a lot of criticism the 1980s was a great decade. Looking back on the big hair, bad clothes and crappy music gives me a smile! But at the time, of course, we didn’t know our hair was outrageously big, our pastel clothing with big shoulder pads was gauche and our music was garbage. Some of us wondered what happened to rock and roll, when we bothered to stop dancing long enough to think about it.

Last week Rolling Stone magazine released its readers’ poll of the worst songs of the 80s. “We Built This City” by Starship came out on top by a long shot.

I happened to be working as a music announcer (deejay if you must) on CKSL all-hit radio in London at the time the song came out. We knew that the song was created by the pop group that grew out of the core of the 1960’s, Woodstock-attending, drug-taking rockers, Jefferson Airplane and we thought that was cool. The song, “We Built This City”, was a catchy, bouncy, danceable number that paid homage to the roots of rock and radio in its lyrics. What’s not to like? It became a massive hit, topping the charts and going on very high rotation on radio stations such as ours. That meant it was played roughly every 90 minutes. Remember, this was AM top-40 radio, based on the huge formatic success of CFTR in Toronto. If a listener tuned in and didn’t hear the number one song, well, you failed.

Now a quarter century later we are all sick to death of the song and it’s been declared the worst. I feel the same way about the pastels I wore back then. But we still need to give it its due. It was a huge hit that we loved and sang along to and requested and played on the radio every 90 mind-numbing minutes. It had its time. It hasn’t been invalidated just because that time has passed.

Other songs on the list of worst of the 80s include Europe’s “The Final Countdown” (well deserved), Chris DeBurgh’s “The Lady in Red” (I was sick of it during its second week on the charts), Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (should have been voted number 1) and “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, which still gets regular airplay on stations that play 1980s music because it counts as Canadian content, a rule that to this day still shackles broadcasters to crappy music.

A colleague at Free-FM and I were discussing our mutual appreciation for Barry Manilow the other day. People seem to forget that Manilow was the king of the charts for a while. He has written some of the catchiest commercial jingles ever including “I am stuck on Band-aid, ’cause Band-aid’s stuck on me” and “Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there” not to mention Pepsi and many others. His “Mandy” and “Weekend in New England” could bring a teenage girl to tears. He has perfect pitch and a wonderful voice. But today’s music fans treat him as a joke. They either weren’t there or they forget. I don’t forget. I remember.