We Built This City

"We Built This City"
Song

"We Built This City" is a song written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf and recorded by the group Starship. Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick sang the song.The lyrics were written by Bernie Taupin, best known for his longtime collaboration with Elton John. The single version reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 on November 16, 1985. The city that the band is singing about in the album version of this song has been generally thought to be San Francisco, California (the traffic report in the bridge references the Golden Gate Bridge), and in Japan it has been sold with Japanese title "Sisuko wa Rokku Sitii (SF is a rock city)". The song was actually written by Taupin to describe Los Angeles in the early 1970's.

Trivia

• The song was also released without the traffic report and DJ interaction during the song's bridge (the B-side of the promotional 45-rpm record). Local stations were encouraged to make local versions. New York City, for example, included a traffic report describing conditions on the George Washington Bridge.
• Punk rock band A Wilhelm Scream released a song titled "We Built This City! (On Debts and Booze)" for their 2007 album Career Suicide.
• MTV executive and former DJ Les Garland provided the DJ voiceover during the song's bridge.
• Australian Punk Rock quartet Frenzal Rhomb did a cover in 2000. In place of the traffic report was the ranting of singer Jason Whalley, claiming that his band were called 'fucking liars' by a man when informed that Frenzal Rhomb were going to cover 'Starship'.
• Janice Cruz from Brooklyn-based indie rock trio Dark Room NYC is featured in the first verse of the video when she was very young.
• The title of the song is used as a slogan by Australia's construction union.
• The lyrics were used to the tune of "Jimmy Crack Corn" in an episode of The Simpsons (Kill the Alligator and Run). Homer also sings the original song multiple times during the episode.
• The song appears in a second season episode of Comedy Central's Drawn Together.
• The British band Half Man Half Biscuit made a play of words on the title for their song 'We Built this Village on a Trad. Arr. Tune'. It appears on their album Achtung Bono.
• A short-lived TLC series named after the song used it in the title sequence. It documented the cultural and architectural history of major cities such as Paris.
• Starship performed this song in the Joe Louis Arena in tribute of the 1997 Stanley Cup Champion Detroit Red Wings.
• It was later covered by LMP on their album A Century of Song.
• A four piece group performed We Built This City for their audition on ITV's The_X_Factor_(UK_series_4) on Saturday 1st September 2007.YouTube video
• Threadless.com sells a T-Shirt sporting the phrase, "A city built on rock and roll would be structurally unsound".
• VH1 and Blender ranked it the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. <http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=819/>