Marconi Plays the Mamba

The Eighties were a paradisical time of lemonade rivers and cotton candy clouds, where everyone had joy and a high fashion sense: hair was big, and women wore lots of makeup, huge earrings, and blouses with shoulder pads. We all ate delicious McDonald's three meals a day, and movie theater popcorn was covered in a buttery substance equivalent to slamming fourteen Big Macs. Eye shadow, lipstick, rouge, Cyndi Lauper hair, and Debbie Gibson eyes were the cultural touchstones that kept Commieland in relative check. (Well, that, and our nuclear arsenal.)

Fire into that void of barbarian movies and Star Wars rip-offs, teeny bopper pop, seventy-five cent comic books, and cultural panic over heavy metal lyrics and emergent "gangster" rap, the happy-ass, hook-heavy pop tunes of a group like Starship, who exemplified Eighties consumerist, shopping mall culture: loose-fitting blazers with the sleeves pulled up, Richard Marx perms, and high-toned synthesizer blasts (with music even tighter than the jeans no American could squeeze their contemporary fat asses into). They are excellent reps, ghosts from another day and age. (Maybe not a more innocent one, but, at the very least, a less complicated one, to be sure).

Starship was, as I understand it, a continuation of Jefferson Starship, which was an outgrowth of Jefferson Airplane, which was some Sixties psychedelic hairy hippy group with the LSD-bombed intensely creepy Grace Slick (who, in the video for "We Built," looks suspiciously like a wide-eyed staring sociopath in drag) holding forth as the vocalist. Okie dokie; I generally don't listen to much music from that era of popular music, although I listen to everything. I don't plan on examining any of the Airplane's legacy personally any time soon, but I'll take you and Wikipedia at their word.

The video begins with a blue-screened tabletop village on a Dungeons and Dragons fairy tale plain where Orcs, Goblins, and fair damsels dressed like Madonna lurketh. Next, we get a surrealistic video cityscape, and a bunch of kids that hang out at Cinnabuns, and the band on a rooftop, and the song is kinda lame at first, BUT, then comes that damned hook:

"MARCONI PLAYS THE MAMBA, LISTEN TO THE RADIO!"

And, mein Gott! After that, after that leitmotiv line, the "hook" as it were, and then the dip back down to the chorus, the listener is completely addicted to the musical hit off the Starship crackpipe, envisioning the face of Reagan, the liverwurst skull stain of the dearly departed Mikhail Gorbachev; the Material Girl; coin-operated arcade games you stood up at; VHS cassettes. What happened to us, people? Once, we had network TV shows like "Alf," "Max Headroom," and "SledgeHammer."

The video features a giant dice threateningly rolling down on the band and their fans to crush them. I was reminded of Dungeons and Dragons again, and thought maybe someone had become demonically possessed after spinning some Prince albums backwards. Grace Slick, who really does have weirdly empty outer space eyes here (a testimony to all that Orange Sunshine she scarfed back in 1967) does a few weird dance moves floating in space before pointing at her head in a way that seems symbolic of the entire decade. "LISTEN TO THE RADIO!" she commands. She might have added, "And support our sponsors!"

Revolt of the Shopping Mall Zombies

It's rebellion. The band is "Searching for America, coming through your schools." They pay lip service to taking aim at greed, and "corporations playing corporation games." They talk about the wrecking ball coming down on radio stations, and most poignantly ask, "Do you remember?" Hüsker Dü, in other words. (In the literal sense of the term, NOT the band, although the band is one of the greatest things to emerge from this very great decade.)

Of course, Starship is, in reality, as conservative as any businessman in a three-piece suit. Their song, their One-Hit Wonder, is as trite, hackneyed, and cliche as any advertising jingle, recycled for commercial use a thousand, thousand times, it's high, cloying, "We built this city!" chorus providing a blistering, early-morning headache to countless drunks and insomniacs the world over.

Or, at the very least, the ones who "LISTEN TO THE RADIO!"

To quote a lyric from the late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton (who was killed in the infamous bus crash in Sweden in 1986): "Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation take me home?"

In this case, back to 1984. When Marconi and Mamba were ONE.

Addendum: A friend told me this song is always associated in his mind with eating at Pizza Hut as a child. To me, the song that recalls Pizza Hut dining in the mid-Eighties is "Simply Irresistible," by Robert Palmer, as it seemed to always be blasting from the jukebox. (But, I may also just be thinking of the food).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to return some videotapes.

Starship - We Built This City (Official Music Video) [HD]

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