HOF Inductee No. 3: "We Built This City," Starship

Someone's always playing corporation games

Who cares, they're always changing corporation names

For some bizarre reason, Starship's perfectly OK pop hit from 1985 makes critics' lists of "Worst Songs of All Time." Really? Not the faux intellectual but ultimately trite "Imagine"? Not the irritating fluffiness of Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go"? Not something anything from a boy band of the late 80s or early 90s? This, Mr. Critic, is your choice for all-time worst, because you are incapable of poetic analysis, i.e., too stupid, to understand the line "Marconi plays the mamba"?

Is this song in the pantheon of all-time classics, up there with "Good Vibrations" or "Satisfaction" or Olivia Newton-John's "Physical"? Be real. But it does deserve to be in the pantheon of all-time earworms. And so it is.

This has all the ingredients for a classic earworm. Catchy pop hooks. Clever lyrics, fragments of which remain embedded in your skull nearly 40 years later. Great vocals by Mickey Thomas, ably supported by the legendary Grace Slick. In fact, it is Ms. Slick's deadpan delivery of the great line about always-changing corporation names quoted above that makes the song for me. You know that she and the band get the humor in the band Jefferson Airplane / Jefferson Starship / Starship singing about "always changing corporation names."

But the line the critics fail to understand is about "Marconi" and the "mamba." Plays the mamba, critics shriek shrilly. A mamba is a snake. A "mam-BO" is something a band would play. Why is Marconi playing a snake and not a Caribbean dance? It's called poetic license, critics. In poetry, words are not always literal. Marconi invented wireless transmission via electromagnetic waves in the long end of the spectrum, the part of the spectrum we call "radio waves." Marconi made the radio playing your favorite pop tunes possible, "Marconi," as used in this song, is a symbol (synecdoche?) for radio.

So what about the "mamba" part. Yes, a mamba is a snake. It is a very poisonous snake. Marconi, i.e., the radio, is playing what? Poison! In the futuristic dystopia in which this song takes place, the radio is spewing forth venomous poison that only loosely can be associated with music. Not like the way it used to be? Don't you remember? We built this city. We built this city on rock and roll!

And we built on hook-saturated pop rock that makes one of the all-time great earworms.