Consider for a moment “We Built This City” by the musical group Jefferson Airplane Starship.

While I profess no particular animosity toward the song (not the way I do, toward, say Bob Carlisle’s “Butterfly Kisses”, for example), I will admit that is objectively pretty terrible. I do kind of have an innate sense of why both popular polls and statistical analysis consistently rank it as the worst song ever, though I hadn’t particularly considered or understood the reasons why.

Until now.

In response to an NPR piece on the All Songs Considered blog not exactly defending Starship’s “We Built This City” (but rather, calling on America to stop piling on the easy target), Fark commenter Corn_Fed hits on the nail completely on the head regarding why the tune is particularly reviled above all other challengers:

The song, taken entirely in isolation, is a fun, good-sounding bit of enjoyable cheese (much like all pop music ever).

However, my theory why it repulses so many is that it represents the ultimate sellout of a 60’s counterculture band into slick corporate product. It mirrored the utter fall of 1960’s Baby Boomer folk idealism into 1980’s corporate yuppyism, which continues today in the perverse form of the diabolic Tea Party.

The baby boomers truly went from inspired forces of social progress to the lowest depravities of selfish evil–and this song precisely crystalizes that descent.

The song is so reviled because it is a constant reminder to Generations X and beyond of the worst aspects of the generation that came before us (as if most aspects of American life since the Baby Boomers hit early middle age and decided that “I got mine” was preferable to “free love” isn’t reminder enough). “Feed Your Head” became “Marconi Plays the Mamba”, and the world went to Hell in a synth-draped handbasket.

Doesn’t really get much clearer than that, does it?