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Starship - We Built This City

1985 · MTV Corporate Rock Peak (1985–1986) — the moment when former underground and psychedelic-era artists (Jefferson Starship spun off from Jefferson Airplane) had fully adapted to high-gloss MTV-programmable production, Top-40 AOR crossover, and the new commercial vocabulary of the Reagan era · music video
Starship - We Built This City music video
1985MTV Corporate Rock Peak (1985–1986) — the moment when former underground and psychedelic-era artists (Jefferson Starship spun off from Jefferson Airplane) had fully adapted to high-gloss MTV-programmable production, Top-40 AOR crossover, and the new commercial vocabulary of the Reagan eraCorporate MTV-Era Rock / mid-80s AOR crossover with electronic keyboard bed, stadium-scale choruses, and built-in promotional voiceover elementDir. Francis Delia

What this video is

The Starship lineage traces back through Jefferson Starship (1974–1984) to Jefferson Airplane (1965–1972), a band that had been a defining act of the San Francisco psychedelic movement and the Summer of Love. By 1985, the Airplane-to-Starship rebrand had shed the counterculture associations almost entirely — surviving members Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas now fronted a high-gloss commercial act. 'We Built This…

Why it matters

Canonical artifact of mid-80s MTV corporate-rock, emblematic of both the commercial colonization of AOR and the meta-commentary embedded in its own bridge. Represents the end-state of the Jefferson Airplane → Jefferson Starship → Starship transition from counterculture to Reagan-era pop. The DJ…

The director

Francis Delia is an American music video and film director active through the 1980s, directing videos for Starship, Billy Idol, The Go-Go's, and others. His work is characterized by rapid-cut performance collage interleaved with signage, mock newscasts, and…

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