Just another false alarm...

Now I'm no fan of Starship, Jefferson Starship or any of the post-Airplane incarnations of that group, but I still don't think that 'We Built This City' is the worst song of all time.

There are far too many candidates to ever make a final decision anyway. A lot depends on personal taste, of course, but I don't see how anyone could think that 'We Built This City' is a worse song than, for instance, the Cheeky Girls' 'Cheeky Song'. Nothing can justify that song's existence; and nothing can compensate me for having had to listen to it three times a night when I worked at the (gay) Nightingale Club in Birmingham.

Gay culture in general has a lot to answer for in making certain people icons - Kylie, Cher, Barbara Streisand - but this lauding of all that is awful seems part of a larger phenomenon of what it means to be young and English these days. We seem to think that there's something very special in our 'ironic' approach to complete rubbish. We vote crap singers with no personality into stardom 'ironically'. We push their records to number one 'ironically'. We live our entire lives to the sound of their beats, in every shop, pub and club, never escaping the noise. And still it's all so bloody ironic. The only irony in this is that somewhere along the way we've created a multi-million pound market for complete shit.

There are certainly a great number of songs which make you want to demand compensation for ever being forced to hear them. 'We Built This City' might well be ranked among them, but I can at least smile at its early eighties excess. Nothing could ever make me smile at The Cheeky Girls. Nothing could make Westlife forgivable; nor S Club 7 excusable. What's needed in this modern music market is less irony, more bloodshed. We must find them all and rip out their vocal chords. Somebody, think of the children!