Nostalgia can be inaccurate, sometimes wildly so. There are two types of inaccurate nostalgia: false and manufactured. False nostalgia is the result of misremembering, an honest mistake of which we are all guilty.
Who among us doesn’t remember lying on our beds or cruising through town listening to one of our favorite songs? Until we remember that the song was released a year and a half later, and we couldn’t have been listening to it while lying in bed or cruising through town, because we had already moved out of our parents’ house and were crashing on a friend’s couch, and we had sold that car a year earlier.
Manufactured nostalgia, however, is generational gaslighting. I’ve never bought into the concept of generational warfare until recently. Gen X is being phased out of the current culture conversation through our musical memories, faulty as they may be.
Like a lot of teens in the 1980s, music was a constant for me and my friends. I know that’s anecdotal, but there’s something to be said for earwitness testimony from those who were there during iconic songs’ heydays. Nostalgia, as a collective set of shared memories, is important.
As the decades stream along, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Gen Xers to accurately remember specifics. For example, I can’t recall the name of either Thompson Twin. Gen X, known for our cynicism, is becoming more susceptible to both types of nostalgia. The current narratives for two iconic pop songs are proof.
We Built This Memory on Old Forgotten Words and Ancient Melodies
For years, the conventional wisdom has held that everyone loved Toto’s “Africa”, from 1982’s Toto IV, and everyone hated Starship’s “We Built This City”, from their 1985 debut album, Knee Deep in the Hoopla. Neither assertion is true, but neither narrative is going away.
I don’t deny that lots of people didn’t and/or still don’t hold these opinions regarding these two songs. However, neither opinion was/is as prevalent as the current false narratives.
Rewriting cultural history is propagandic. Telling any demographic what they liked and what they didn’t like is disingenuous at best and evil at worst. Such is the nature of gaslighting.
“Africa” and “We Built This City” were big hits during my generation’s determining years, tunes even casual listeners would have heard on the radio back then, and casual reminiscers will recognize now. The 1980s are often regarded by pop-culture pundits as having more style than substance, of being fake. So why continue the fakery with these two songs?
Words mean things. We should hold to that.
I’m not arguing that Starship’s “We Built This City” is a great song. Nor am I calling for Toto’s “Africa” as its replacement for the worst song ever. This is not an exhaustive comparison/contrast of the subjective merits of each song, but rather of how they and our memories have been cast in our collective nostalgia. Both songs have fans. Both songs have haters. Neither group is a monolithic bloc.
Just as certain media outlets tried to make us all retroactively love “Africa”, some still seem determined to have us all retroactively hate “We Built This City”. As recently as October 2025, music writer Michael Gallucci included Knee Deep in the Hoopla and its iconic song “We Built This City” in his list of “Rock’s Most Hated Records” in an article for ultimateclassicrock.com. Of course he did.
I don’t have a (wild) dog in this fight. My musical tastes differed in the years these two songs hit Number One in America. In 1983, my friends and I were more interested in how Ian Gillan was replacing Ronnie James Dio in Black Sabbath. In 1985, we were more interested in seeing Black Sabbath reunite with their original singer, Ozzy, for their one-off Live Aid performance.
Though neither Starship nor Toto has ever been one of my favorite bands, I respect both groups’ longevity. Both have songs that bring pleasure to listeners (Admit it: you’ve already replayed the catchiest parts of both tunes in your head while reading this). Both songs have also made a lot of money for their respective record labels.
“Africa” was a Billboard Number One hit in 1983, so obviously a lot of people liked it. In 1985, “We Built This City” was also a number-one hit. Just as I don’t remember “We Built This City” being particularly despised during its initial run, I don’t recall “Africa” being anyone’s favorite song back then.
To be fair, “Africa” isn’t any worse than a hundred songs (or more) released during the 1980s. Anyone categorizing “We Built This City” as the worst song of the ’80s wasn’t there or wasn’t paying attention. Is it even the worst song of 1985? Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy“, anyone?
In 1985, seeing the remnants of the iconic Jefferson Airplane on the charts was akin to watching the Cincinnati Reds’ Pete Rose go one-for-four in a game that same year. It was a privilege to witness even the shadow of former greatness.
The campaign against “We Built This City” began snowballing in the late 1990s, years after the song’s heyday, when a couple of former band members made snarky comments and viewers pounced. In the late ’90s, maybe Gen X was entering generational perimenopause, so the vitriol kicked in. Gen X has always been lippy. I blame Miami Vice‘s Crockett and Tubbs.
Jed Gottlieb addresses the backlash in his 2021 article for ultimateclassicrock.com “In Defense Of: Starship’s ‘We Built This City”. In August 2025, Jake Rossen also gave some background in his Mental Floss article “How ‘We Built This City’ Went from No. 1 Hit to ‘Worst Song Ever’”. There are probably others, but these two pieces cover it sufficiently.
Nostalgia Allows for Corrections
Why is one song canonized while the other demonized when they share several similarities? Both songs had their doubters and detractors among the musicians who created them.
Starship co-vocalist Grace Slick despised “We Built This City”. In the above-mentioned Mental Floss article, she is quoted as calling it “the worst song ever.” To be fair to Slick, whose iconic status was cemented with “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” long before 1985, no one in Starship wrote the song.
It was probably burdensome to sing the admonishment “Don’t you remember?” to audience members whose parents weren’t even alive in Marconi’s day. (The following year, when glam metal band Tesla released their debut album, we all found out who really invented the radio.)
In an article for Far Out, Elle Palmer refers to an interview in Rock Eyez with Toto guitarist Steve Lukather and his quote regarding his initial dismissal of “Africa”: “I swore that if it was a hit record, I’d run naked down Hollywood Boulevard!”
An assemblage of some of the best session musicians of the 1970s, Toto is among the best pop acts of the 1980s. Anyone unwilling to acknowledge the awesomeness of the powerhouse declaration of love that is “Rosanna” or of mid-tempo rocker “Hold the Line” should probably just stop reading now. Both songs’ lyrics were written by Toto keyboardist David Paich.
Paich also wrote the lyrics for “Africa”.
Legendary singer/songwriter and acidic wit Randy Newman famously dismissed America’s song, “Horse with No Name”, as being about “a kid who thinks he’s taken acid.” I posit Toto’s “Africa” follows that same kid on safari.
I feel quite strongly about this.
Another Far Out writer, Will Howard, in another recent article, calls the line in “Africa” about Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti the “most infamous example” of Toto’s band members lacking real knowledge of the continent. Probably all too true. The proximity of Mt. Kilimanjaro to the Serengeti has been a topic of much discussion. That line, however, is not the worst in the song as far as wordcraft.
The protagonist of “Africa” is meeting his love who is coming on the “twelve-thirty flight”. We do not know his mode of transportation to the airport (horse?), but he “stopped an old man along the way” because that is what a young man meeting his special woman would do, right?
Does he stop the old man for advice re: romance? No. “Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies.”
At least Paich acknowledges the importance of words.
The old man turns to the young man “as if to say, ‘Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you.’”
No, boy, he turned to you as if to say, “You and the horse you rode in on get off my continent.”
The chorus contains arguably some of the worst lyrics in pop music history. Hyperbole should at least be logical.
“There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.”
Sure, there is. A hundred men or more could beat 99 men or fewer in a fight. If they cooperated, a hundred men or more could lift a sizable object. A hundred men or more could drag you away from me.
I have questions regarding the line about blessing rain. I’m not Catholic, so I don’t understand how that works.
Let’s forgo discussion about the wild dogs who are “longing for some solitary company”.
Yes. “Solitary company.”
Paich should have known better. To whom much is given, much shall he bless the rain on the unjust, or something like that. Yeah, I’m sure he gives a wild dog’s ass what I think.
I’m as into the current pop-culture juggernaut Stranger Things as much as any Gen Xer suffering from nostalgia, but regarding our memories and their contexts in current pop culture, it’s probably no coincidence that “Africa” is background music in one of the cringiest scenes in the whole sci-fi fantasy series.
Words are important, not just for their individual meanings, but also for how they are pieced together to frame narratives, make statements, and ask questions.
“Africa” and “We Built This City” got a lot of airplay on the radio and on MTV in the 1980s, which was standard. What MTV gave in the ’80s, it sometimes took in the ’90s. Just ask video hunk Kip Winger how his career nosedived after Stewart Stevenson wore a Winger shirt on Beavis and Butthead. Also, former Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship member Paul Kantner’s dismissive quote regarding “We Built This City” on MTV sister channel VH1’s Behind the Music seemed to trigger a lot of disdain for the song.
Still, the music industry pushed twice for a hit with “Africa”. That second push, a cover by Weezer more than 35 years after the song’s original release, worked. Such is the power of manufactured nostalgia.
The Weezer version of “Africa”, released in 2018, began as something of a joke, but it put the tune back on the charts and returned it to the cultural forefront. Writer Dan Ozzi explained this viral phenomenon the following year in his Vice article “The Whole Weezer/’Africa’ Thing Was My Fault and I’m So Sorry”.
This essay is also contributing to that phenomenon, but these things need to be said. Words have meaning. For aging Gen Xers wallowing in their nostalgia, words can stick on Replay with ancient melodies.
Don’t you remember?
Works Cited
Gallucci, Michael. “Rock’s Most Hated Records.” ultimateclassicrock.com. 14 October 2025.
Gottlieb, Jed. “In Defense Of: Starship’s ‘We Built This City’.” ultimateclassicrock.com. 25 April 2021.
Howard, Will. “Social work and marriage: What is Toto’s ‘Africa’ actually about?” faroutmagazine.co.uk. 25 October 2025.
Ozzi, Dan. “The Whole Weezer/’Africa’ Thing Was My Fault and I’m So Sorry.” vice.com. 25 January 2019.
Palmer, Elle. “Why Toto’s Steve Lukather Hated ‘Africa’.” faroutmagazine.co.uk. 14 December 2023.
Rossen, Jake. “How ‘We Built This City’ Went from No. 1 Hit to ‘Worst Song Ever’.” mentalfloss.com. 20 August 2025.