Listening to this song you realise that at some point the idea that a rock record should sound like a bunch of people in the same place playing the same music at the same time was completely abandoned by record producers. Not in the name of experimentation, or expanding a record’s sound, but I guess just because that kind of verisimilitude didn’t seem relevant any more. In its way this even seems a more radical shift than genres like dub reggae or techno which were clearly studio constructs from the off.
This is a long way of saying that there’s something quite off about a song like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”: built for a movie, it has the same oddly flat, perspective-warping quality as a studio set, like it only really exists in the context of the action, when it’s soundtracking something. That eerie dead space is created pretty much entirely by the echo on the percussion: I guess it could also be filled by crowds of people singing along, which is why arena rockers took to this kind of song.
Listened to alone there’s a discrepancy between the size and effort of the sound (colossal) and the emotional take-out from it (pea-sized) that tips me into laughter when Starship try and go up a gear leading into the guitar solo. Maybe if I’d put more hours in with Grace Slick’s earlier work I’d find it in me to despise Starship but for all its vacuous, leaden bigitude, deep in its tiny heart this is affable enough to be harmless.
Score: 4
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Don’t you need somebody to love? ow, harsh. i’d understand if this was a crazy year and you needed a sacrificial donkey to the god of stats. I like the ridiculous shift after the middle 8 into the solo. it’s the 80s man.
Never seen the film. It looks like a Police Academy film from the video.
A major major guilty pleasure for me — this is exactly the level of bombastic ’80s cheese that hits me right in the pleasure center of the brain.
“We Built This City,” meanwhile, hits me right in the gag reflex. I don’t know how my brain makes these distinctions.
The most comical moment is the urgent ‘What DO they know?’, with the emphasis on the ‘do’ as opposed to the ‘they’.
#2 heh, I almost said something about how I kind of like “We Built This City” – it’s smug boomer self-congratulation but so flagrant about it it’s rather appealing.
Records not far away from this will get higher marks from me, I’m sure – this one is cheese that’s been left out on the kitchen table a bit too long and has gone all rindy.
In the right context this song is a 10. At a birthday party, for instance, or a wedding. Or possibly in a fun-looking 80s movie that my parents didn’t let me go see because it literally imagined its heroine as a portable doll.
add to the “hasn’t grace slick aged well” file: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKxd0SAJmRE
Blimey are we up to this already ? I’d have placed this later into the summer. Shows how work speeds up your life !
I’ve always had opposing reactions to this. On one hand I’m pleased we have an opportunity to talk about Grace Slick. As well as being a great singer she was the first independent woman in rock but never really gets the kudos for that from critics who prefer to extol junkie Janis. Similarly Jefferson Airplane always seem to be reluctantly acknowledged behind Doors, ‘Dead, Love and the Velvets when discussing that late 60s flowering of US rock.
On the other hand this is an utter travesty of everything she originally stood for. By this time the twice-mutated band were pretty much finished and she is little more than a guest star on the record. That horrible video with her cavorting with a poodle-headed toy boy with her big hair and shoulder pads sums up everything that was bad about 1987.
This was a long-delayed second number one (since “When I need You”) for writer Albert Hammond and the first of many for his partner Diane Warren. Both have done better than this- a vacuous song for an even more vacuous film.
Is this really the first Diane Warren #1? Blimes.
The U.S. matched this at #1. Their 3rd #1 single in America in a 16 month period. Lead singer Mickey Thomas often gets ridiculed for his bomobastic vocals that dominated latter day Starship albums, but I often find myself defending him. Not for forgettable stuff like this, but because he was the lead singer on Elvin Bishop’s 1976 #2 (U.S.) blue-eyed soul classic, “Fooled Around and Fell In Love”. As for his Starship tenure, try 1979’s “Jane” for pure over-the-top lung power that would make Steve Perry blush.
This is more enjoyable now than it was at the time. It has a really appealing join-the-dots quality, in confirming your expectations as to what rhyme or bit of arrangement is coming next… The two voices leaven the stodge with a bit of diversity, too.
The video even makes Mannequin look quite fun, though I imagine that enjoyment might pall over two hours… I’d really like to see the 1968 Journey Into The Unknown episode where a teenage Dennis Waterman falls in love with a mannequin, though. I occasionally hear old people with long memories remember that – Doesn’t he get killed and it end with a shot of the weeping dummy?
Number 2 Watch: A week of Tom Jones’ ‘A Boy From Nowhere’ – the usual slush which, barring details of production and arrangement, could have come from 1967.
Light Entertainment Watch: Just the one UK promotional appearance;
WOGAN: with Rob Andrew, Brian Blessed, John & Alan Boon, Gareth Edwards, Starship, Shirley Williams (1986)
It’s a million miles (or parsecs even) from White Rabbit isn’t it!
Grace Slick was no spring chicken in 1967 of course, so by the time we get here she’s nearly as old as I am now. Neither I nor those I hung out with underestimated Jefferson Airplane. It’s when they went silly and became Jefferson Starship that we left them behind.
Had White Rabbit hit the top in 1967 it would have been a sure 10 from me. As for this one, I think 4 is perhaps a tad generous.
This is one of the best song’s ever written.
Up there with Kiss’s “Crazy Nights”.
Kim Cattrall’s star vehicle was a bit of a turkey, and Starship’s MOR/soft rock workout from Mannequin has Bernard Matthews stamped all over it. Much preferred “We Built This City” for it’s singalong chorus.
As so Grace Slick has so unflinchingly written since (and she is perhaps the only artist I’ve ever heard come out and say this)she finds the whole idea of herself or anyone else over a certain age still doing rock music complately ridiculous but as she hints if someone wants to pay her to do it – the money’s always useful- so what the hell…
I really dug Jefferson Airplane. Best band name ever?
In fact I got so into them that I couldn’t stop playing their After Bathing at Baxters album, which remains a real favourite, years after I more or less stopped listening to that genre.
I gave my copy of Baxters to Exeter Uni’s american music library in my first year in return for a day of sitting taping their records.
Anyway, this. Well its not good is it? But good on Grace Slick having a number 1.
Booming fromage, of course, but for me it’s inextricably linked with a gorgeous, sunkissed day in 1987, as Spring melted into Summer, and Gary Davies introduced it on Top Of The Pops with the words “A perfect song for a day like this…” And every time I hear it I can almost taste that day again, and all those years ahead of me.
This somehow simultaneously makes me cringe and yet feel strangely nostalgic. I wouldn’t choose to listen to it however so 4 seems about right. I hate ‘We built this city’ mind you.
I hope Marcello can give us some of the context of Grace Slick’s trajectory from Airplane credibility to Starship schlock. Her persona on a JA spinoff was the Chrome Nun which suggests a glossy and impenetrable facade at odds with the fuzzier, hippie nation vibe of bands like the Grateful Dead and which is apparent in earlier songs such as ‘White Rabbit and ‘Somebody to Love’. While it is beguiling in those performances by the stage of it is not appealing
speaking of grace slick, i saw a tv programme years ago that chronicled an onstage pseduo-breakdown which involved her heckling a german audience with repeated cries of “WHO WON THE WAR?”. searched for on youTube lo these many years, as this seems to be the sort of thing youTube is made for but, alas, no luck. am i just imagining this or does anyone else remember it happening?
God this song is annoying. I think Tom’s on to something about its airless/suffocating production being the alchemical feature that turns it utterly toxic (at least for many people). Maybe in some objective sense this record deserves a 3, say, but subjectively it’s into ‘minus figures’ (I like the whole of popular music a little less after hearing it).
love “jane” and “rock band” as much if not more than “white rabbit” and “somebody to love” and “fooled around and fell in love” over all of them. this is pretty awful however, worse than the movie even, worse than the other iran-contra era starship hits. 2 for me.
Didn’t realise this was a Dianne Warren co-write. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics for We Built This City are much better. This song is the reason I’ve never seen Mannequin. I always thought this was earlier than ’87…
is that Fischerspooner in the video?
#23: Oh really.. then can you tell us what “Marconi plays the mamba” means?
“Marconi plays the mamba” = it is possible thru the technology of wireless telegraphy to hear HOT LATIN MUSIC in your NON HOT LATIN HOME
I never ‘investigated’ the Jeffs, as they never hit the UK in any great way, but I can imagine this sort of thing actually putting off people from going back to hear pillow/baxters/etc.
Other bands from the sixties may have split up before they went ‘corporate’, or still managed to produce vital stuff for themselves.
.. and we thought the Stones were past it in 1977!
@26 that was basically the entire underpinning of my undergraduate thesis paper
This feels like the last gasp at the top of that distinctively hollow and huge mid-’80s sound. There’s something to be thankful for. 4 at best.
Number three in Australia – our Starship number 1 was “We, Jefferson Starship and/or Airplane, Built This City All By Ourselves, So There”.
J Airplane went off the boil quite dramatically after S Pillow. Baxters has no tunes whatsoever. I think it may be the single worst album released by a major act. Worse than Be Here Now even.
Another thumbs up for Jane, twinned in manic top-end piano riffery with Toto’s Hold The Line
Taken from the abysmal 1987 rom-com Mannequin, in which Andrew McCarthy builds a dummy which turns into Kim Cattrall (and a young, wary James Spader keeping his countenance in the background), “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” – not to be confused with Samantha Fox’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now,” which was in the top ten at the same time – is the archetypal slushy, bombastic AoR song suitable for such glossy sub-entertainment, composed by time-serving pros Diane Warren and Albert Hammond, and there would be little point in going any deeper into its shallow pond of artistry were it not for the immense sorrow of the knowledge of whom Starship once were.
Perhaps the saddest moment of the whole song (and its video) is the point where Grace Slick enters with her Morticia Addams cackle of “Let ’em say we’re cra-ZAY!” and does that regrettable leer and finger-twirl at the camera. There are two ways of interpreting this; either Grace is signalling to us: “Hey, we know this is shit, but we need a hit, and y’know, underneath the gloss it’s still us!” or (the worse and likelier option) they are trying to shanghai us into thinking that nothing has changed, that this is the way Jefferson Airplane would eventually have flown in any case.
Not surprisingly, you will search the archives of the British singles chart for “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love” in vain, and in truth the Airplane’s records – Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing At Baxter’s and all the rest of them – never lived up to their reputedly titanic live reputation. The strangeness and stridency of the 1967 Grace Slick helped lay the path for the Siouxsie Siouxs and Kristin Hershes of subsequent decades; and I suppose it’s a comfort of sorts that twenty-one years after “Delicate Colours,” Hersh has not approached Warren for a singalong moneyspinner. But to see Slick, Kantner and Balin prostitute themselves so gladly on the Reaganite catwalk – “We Built This City” may have been a terrible record, but at least bore the ghost of rebellion with its “corporation games” – is like viewing reformed Communists being paraded at bayonet point before the cameras, forced to recant their past ideological “sins.” Thankfully, this is about as bad as 1987 number ones get.
Or is it?
(Postscript to the above: it would appear that Grace Slick had similar views and quit Starship not long after this record. Jefferson Airplane evolved gradually into stadium rock Jefferson Starship as the seventies wore on but so did Slick’s alcoholism; she eventually cleaned up for the eighties which may explain her subsequent, as it were, slickness.)
(PPS: Mannequin may or may not be based on Jonathan King’s novel Bible 2.)
I thought Mannequin was some sort of dumbed down pre-feminist take on Pygmalion.
Not quite as offensive as I remember it but that’s probably the distance of time and me getting more mellow in my opinions in my dotage. The tune is actually OK but it’s sunk by the Mr. Sheen production and bombastic cigarette-lighter waving quality of the chorus.
I haven’t looked ahead to see what’s coming up in the charts (I like the surprise) but is this the end of the 80s? It does sound like the nadir of that sound to me.
The outstanding feature of this song is Grace Slick’s vocal. On the likes of “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”, she elevates a couple of fine rock songs into some of the most compelling music of the era; here, she elevates something pretty mediocre into something rather more passable, but as the consensus on here goes, it does sound like she’s wasted on it. But it’s one of the songs and the movies that the late 80s are remembered for, albeit by people mainly younger than me!! – and if these survivors of a golden era of US rock became corporate, I guess it’s a fate very few have escaped.
Funnily enough I don’t remember Mannequin being such a big hit as a film as to warrant the spinoff single being at number one for a month, but there you go. I’ve seen it a couple of times and will always spend an undemanding hour or two watching it if it turns up on TV – though not for the plot, the writing or the borderline-offensive gay stereotype. Let’s just say that what Agnetha Faltskog was to the 70s, Kim Cattrall was to the 80s. And judging by her recent “Who Do You Think You Are?”, what a charming and warm personality to go with it. (drifts off into reverie…)
what an awful record, though at least it’s not quite as bad as the ear bashing, vom inducing ‘we built this city’. starship has got to be pop’s worst ever comeback hasn’t it? presumably what they had in mind was something like the tasteful eighties-isation fleetwood mac were doing at about the same time, or even leonard cohen’s extraordinary ‘i’m your man’ reinvention, but it really, really, doesn’t come across like that – even to someone who doesn’t like JAs sixties stuff all *that* much this is the sound of dignity going for a low price.
they showed that extraordinarily tense and depressing film of altamont on bbc4 recently (“gimme shelter”, I think), featuring the early JA bravely trying to stand up against hells angels invading their stage and getting smacked in the face for their troubles. i won’t make the obvious gag, but it barely seems credible that they were the same bunch of people as this crowd of poodled imbeciles.
Punctum – I suggest that ‘Let ’em say we’re crayzeh’ is the ONLY worthwhile moment of NGSUN, ie memorable, silly,, and worth using as a punchline every so often.
#31 To answer your rhetorical question Punctum there is one worse coming up and British to boot. Think Grace Slick’s daughter.
Yet another mid 80s monstrosity to go in the ‘I can laugh about it now but at the time it was terrible’ file.
But yes, the ‘Lettum say we’re crayzeh!’ bit is fantastic though, isn’t it?
By the way, was this Starship’s last hit? I don’t recall them troubling the Top 40 again.
Back then, with taste filters way out of whack (or more honest? Nah, way out of whack), I sort of liked We Built This City. The shrillness, the almost robotic voices and the synthy sheen appealed. Can’t have liked it enormously, otherwise I’d have bought it along with most of the other records in any given Top 40, but I’d give it a listen.
This, however, was always a trudgy lump.
but is this the end of the 80s?
There’s a bunnyable Belinda Carlisle track coming up in Jan 1988 that’s essentially just this record again. And, at least if you were in the US there was all manner of stuff from ‘Waiting for a star to fall’ to all of Def Leppard’s hysteria hits coming right up over the next year or two. So, no. No end in sight!
Thought about small differences (perhaps unfairly) making a big difference: Heart’s hair-pop 80’s hits such as Alone, These dreams, and even What about love? (w/ members of starship doing back vox I believe) are pretty acceptable guilty pleasures by comparison to NGSU and WBTC. I’m not sure I can really defend my different responses: slightly better arrangements? Ann Wilson’s voice just slightly more human (while retaining paint-stripping power)? But I suspect that my basic reactions are typical.
Sorry to harp on this, but “mambo” is hot latin music, whereas a “mamba” is a poisonous snake. It’s hard to believe a professional songwriter of many years experience made that mistake or that a professional singer with similar experience plus a stylish perm could’ve stumbled like that.
Agree with Punctum about both film and song.
Mannequin is indeed desperate in spite of having a guest appearance from the wonderful Estelle Getty.
The song is boring. We seem to be in a phase where the production of number one hits is either glistening and appealingly superficial or just utter schlock such as this.
As for the Airplane’s career, it’s amazing to me how errant their commercial instincts were. After scoring two huge hits featuring the soaring & distinctive vocals of Grace Slick how do they follow it up? With the shouty group vocal of “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil.” And then? With the single “Watch Her Ride” featuring PAUL KANTNER on lead vocal. Oh, and they had another great singer in the group called Marty Balin – where was he at this time? I wonder if this has anything to do with the hippie ethos the group were supposed to represent… it’s almost like they were making some kind of anti-capitalist statement.
“If the world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other” is a pretty grim sentiment in a certain light.
Grace Slick was the only Surrealistic Pillow-era member left by the time they did NGSUN (Paul Kantner lasted until 1984).
Their last hit was the ghastly “It’s Not Enough” (US #12 in 1989). The follow-up to NGSUN was the # 9 “It’s Not Over (til it’s Over)”, which was voted worst single of the year in Rolling Stone.
#44 The back story behind the song actually makes it a little (just)more appealing. Albert Hammond’s ex-wife had been obstructing their divorce for a number of years and he and Warren wrote it to celebrate finally being able to marry.
“Not surprisingly, you will search the archives of the British singles chart for “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love” in vain” – Not quite! Such was the extent to which Starshipmania was sweeping the UK in 1987, that a rerelease of White Rabbit managed one week at number 94 that summer.
#47 As you probably already know Billy the “Bubbling Under” or “Next 25” sections have never officially counted as hits because from 75 downwards the chart was tweaked to exclude records going down and favour new entries. Almost certainly WR was not the 94th best seller that week. And it wasn’t Starshipmania that put it there but its featuring in the film “Platoon”.
This was grim cheese coming courtesy of an old gal who should have stayed home with her bunny, white, spoiler or whatever else. It’s rather akin to Tina Charles coming back and trying to groove today. Just wrong.
@49: Kate Bush was 47 when she released Aerial to great acclaim. I know the comparison with NGSUN doesn’t do Starship and Slick any favours, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with making music at that age.