The new Muppets soundtrack features We Built This City, the 1985 number-one hit by Starship — which was no longer Jefferson Starship by that point.
Blender magazine named it the worst of its “50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever” — and Rolling Stone readers voted it the worst song of the 1980s.
Hearing it again after 26 years, I have to ask, what’s the deal with the “Marconi plays the mamba” lyric? So, the (arguable) inventor of the radio plays… a venomous snake? Does it make that much more sense for Marconi to play “the” mambo?
Several lyric sites do give the lyric as “mambo.” This should in no way be construed as an endorsement of Starship or “We Built This City.” ;-)
It’s a fun song with a good hook, slightly overblown, but these guys weren’t coming out of nowhere, this is the Jefferson Airplane. Rolling Stone, which has attempted to promote some truly appalling music and acts, has no room to declare this solid song among “the worst.” Basically, Rolling Stone gave you the early 70s. If you thought that was pop music’s golden age, well …