(12) CHARLENE, “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”
razed
(1) starship, “we built this city”
305-275
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 19.

Is the Worst Song of All Time Actually the Best? alison stine on “we built this city”

On the last night of 2019, my partner and I had dinner in a former mortuary.
It was a popular restaurant, fancy. We had trouble with the drink menu, not wanting to order edible gold. The mortuary, in a historically Latino neighborhood, had been named after the family that owned it. The restaurateurs had just taken one letter off the sign to re-name it, decorated the space with prayer fans and paintings of coffins. We wondered if the rich people dining around us knew the history.
My partner was born and raised in the city, Denver, which has had a huge influx of young, wealthy white people. Much of his family still lived here. Just not where they had been for generations. Right up the street from the restaurant had been his grandparents’ house. Then it was torn down, replaced by condos.
A few days earlier, we were at my parents’ house in rural Ohio when my sister pulled up a picture on her phone. She had driven by the small farm where my mother was born, where the family had grown corn, soybean, and winter wheat. I didn’t know the farm had been sold—but now it was demolished. The tiny, red, two bedroom house where my grandparents had raised six children was gone, replaced by a McMansion, a much more lavish house than my grandparents had ever stepped foot in, let alone lived in.
How did “We Built This City,” the first hit for Starship, the rock band that members of Jefferson Starship morphed into, become the worst song of all time? Like a hipster mortuary restaurant, like a McMansion on my farming family’s land, it started out as something very different. And real.
They were simple, the lyrics Bernie Taupin wrote. A simple song about a specific story: the closing of live music clubs in LA. You can still hear the bones of this song if you listen hard:

Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face.
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place.

It’s not hard to read more into these lyrics, read a context, written at an intense time when the LA music business was dominated by white men; when, nationally, the National Cancer Institute had just announced the discovery of the retrovirus that causes AIDS. Intensity is in Mickey Thomas’s opening performance on the final song, the emphasis on “that kind of place.” He sounds like an outsider, as the listeners are too. We’re being pushed out, and the things we like are considered wrong.
In that respect, the song could be singing about itself, predicting its own future.
Vocalist and stalwart “We Built This City” defender Thomas said in GQ: “Anybody who says the lyrics are dumb hasn't taken the time to digest the verses. I don't think there's anything dumb about ‘looking for America, crawling through your schools.’”
Lyricist Taupin wanted to branch away from being known just as Elton John’s longtime collaborator, and the demo of the song by Martin Page is certainly a departure. Page referred to the song in its original form as “almost like a rebellion,” which Thomas echoed, in an email published on Ultimate Classic Rock: “I felt it was a protest song, but not really in an angry sense … It impressed me more as a feeling of lost innocence.”
Perhaps it will help to know that Taupin, who described the song as “very dark,” wrote it at the same time as the earnest and pleading These Dreams, recorded by Heart (“Every second of the night I live another life”).
My partner said Page’s demo of “We Built This City” sounds like a My Chemical Romance song. Moody, slower, it seems years before its time:

But the time was the 80s—and soon the simple song with a beautiful melody was padded with synthesizers, an elaborate production which now seems like early CGI dinosaurs. Add in an overproduced music video, further diluting and confusing the message. As Starship guitarist Craig Chaquico put it: “The song says we built this city on live music, let's bring it back—but the music is computerized. It complains about techno pop, but it's a techno-pop song. It exemplifies the problem it's protesting.”
The song was muddled again in the addition and perennial misunderstanding of its lyrics, the most outrageous of which is: “Well if you got the toco.” (taco? what??)
The lyric is actually: “Police have got the chokehold.” This corresponded to a sample of audio in the middle of the song, which in the demo was a taped recording of police responding to a protest. In final production, that police chatter was switched out, replaced with a sample of MTV executive Les Garland talking about traffic and the weather.
OK.
“Marconi plays the mamba” is the most hotly debated (hated?) lyric. Taupin downplayed it. In a 2020 Los Angeles Times interview, when asked if the lyric had a point, he said: “None whatsoever!” But Guglielmo Marconi was the inventor of the radio, and many believe “mamba” was supposed to be “mambo”—a slip of the tongue that stuck. Radio rhymes with mambo, after all.
There’s a little too much distancing going on here. Is the song so bad—or is it the production? Is it the erasure of the song’s intent, all this pandering and watering down, and the addition of overblown 80s sound, making “We Built This City” possibly the finest example of art by committee?
What happens when a bunch of executives get ahold of something in which they glimpse a kernel of truth? Well, they disguise it, of course. You walk back on something you know is real because you’re afraid.
Is the worst song of all time really the best?
In the GQ article, a member of a unnamed “successful 80s band” who rejected the song when it was brought to them by a producer, called it “the most pussy thing I've ever heard.”
We’re uncomfortable with the earnestness of “We Built This City.” From the beginning, it was angry and sad at the same time. But it was also loved, even with its 80s overdrive. And that is the thing that still surprises me about it now: the rush to deny we ever loved it.
But we did. We did love it. We still do.
Page said: “‘We Built This City’ is like Mickey Mouse. People want to knock it and they want to love it.” It makes sense that the song was used in a British commercial featuring a little girl riding her bike with training wheels, kitten in the bike basket. The child is lip-syncing the song, dreaming big dreams: that her kitten is singing. That she is a rock star, the headlamps of a neighbor’s car: spotlights; the sprinklers coming on: stadium fireworks. When he saw the commercial, Page said: “I nearly cried.”

It’s a big dream song: hopeful, defiant, and naïve. It’s pure, even in its ridiculousness, or more so because of it.
“We Built This City” is a love letter you send to your crush and then pretend it was a joke when they hesitate. “We Built This City” is the time-consuming meal you don’t season at the last minute or you season too much, with everything you have. And in doing so, you appeal to no one. “We Built This City” really wants you to like it. “We Built This City” is trying its best. “We Built This City” would hate this competition.
“We Built This City” is overcorrection. It’s Tori Amos in Y Kant Tori Read. It’s me bleaching my black hair. The McMansion of music, constructed over a simple but solid farm where in the summer, my family grew strawberries. In the winter, Christmas trees.
I was five or six when I first heard the song, coming through the radio on my school bus. Shuttling through the dark fields one winter morning, all the kids stopped what they were doing—teasing each other, copying homework—and began to sing. The school bus of children sang the whole song. When it was done, the driver said: Well, I like it better when you sing than when you talk.
I’d never had that kind of communal art experience before. Or really, since. But it’s an experience that happens a lot with “We Built This City.” It’s a stadium song, a song that can get a crowd on their feet, singing or screaming with just one line—so much so that sound engineers at major sporting events frequently play just the first line, then PAUSE.
We built this city.
It’s enough. The crowds know. Everyone knows what the song is, everyone has feelings about it, mostly tinged with nostalgia for a time they may or may not have lived through. But they want it back. They want the simplicity and the belonging. Producer Peter Wolf added that legendary chorus at the beginning, cementing the once-dark song’s reputation as catchy, bouncy enough for stadiums, for my school bus.
But the strength of the song is not the chorus. It’s the mamba/mambo line. It’s the one that follows, the imploring “Listen to the radio. Don’t you remember.” “We Built This City” wants you to remember what things were like before the rich people moved in, before our grandparents lost their houses, or the schools closed, or the clubs closed.
You live in the high rise, but we built this city.
You collect the rent checks, but we built this city.
You have the fancy job, but we built this city.
You gatekeep art and culture, but we built this city.
You razed my family land, but we built this city.
We all need something to believe in, to hold onto, even in a world that wants us gone, even as it tries to erase us.
Listen. Listen hard. Don’t you remember?

Alison Stine’s novel Road Out of Winter will be published by MIRA in September. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Kenyon Review. She writes at The Village Witch.   

NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE: ZOË BOSSIERE ON “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”

I had hoped to internalize the music. To listen to Charlene’s one-hit wonder on repeat until the lyrics settled deep down into the recesses of my brain, where bad songs and useless information go to be preserved for all eternity. To listen until, maybe, I even liked it a little bit in spite of myself.
In the months between selecting “I’ve Never Been to Me” for this tournament last July and when these words were written, I’ve cued the song up on Spotify and YouTube more times than I can count. I listened to multiple different versions by several artists to break up the monotony of Charlene’s breathy refrain; I played it in situations where I would not be able to leave, such as while taking a shower or behind the wheel of a car; I forced myself to muscle through the song for the sake of art, a la Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage. But invariably, by the third or fourth repeat, I’d rip off my headphones in a sweaty desperation, reaching a point where I couldn’t get through the song one more time. Not even for another second. By November, this ritual of failing to listen to, let alone write about, “I’ve Never Been to Me” was beginning to get under my skin. I worried ceaselessly about the uncertain future of this essay. So eventually I put my headphones away and did what many of us resort to when we’re stuck and need advice: I called my mom.
It turns out this was not the worst place to start; my mom is roughly the same age as Charlene and was alive to witness the rise of “I’ve Never Been to Me” on the charts from a paltry #97 in 1977 all the way to a respectable #3 in 1982. 1977 also happens to be the year my much-older sister was born. Mom was nineteen, living in the deep Georgia south with the disaffected high school boyfriend her parents had all but forced her to marry, shotgun style, after her pregnancy. Savannah was a long way from Charlene’s star-studded existence in Los Angeles, but according to the latter’s memoir (also called “I’ve Never Been to Me”), Charlene and Mom had a lot in common, both as “discontented mothers” and “regimented wives.” I don’t know about making love to preacher men or sipping champagne on a yacht, but Mom did lead quite the storied life throughout her twenties, first running away with my then two-year-old sister to Seattle, Washington where she made and sold dresses at the Pike Place Market, and, later, joining an Eastern European traveling circus with my dad where the two of them performed onstage with sea lions. My birth is not even the tenth most interesting item on her long list of adventurous experiences.
The first time I call her, Mom is in the middle of packing an order for her online paper crafting store, a business venture she’s taken on in her sixties. This enterprising is typical of her. While most of her friends are thinking about how they’d like to spend their retirement, Mom is out hustling for her future, one stamp set at a time. She seems distracted when I ask her whether she remembers Charlene and what she thought about “I’ve Never Been to Me” back when she was a young mother, herself. Just as Mom is about to answer, she’s overtaken by a dry coughing spell.
“People—people thought—it was stupid,” she gasps into the receiver.
“Like stupid how?” I ask. I wait while she takes a sip of water.
“The song was just so corny,” she says. “The music, the words, everything about it.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but Mom says, “Can I call you back in thirty minutes?”
She does not call me back. 

As might be clear by now, I can’t stand “I’ve Never Been to Me,” and if you’re reading this, chances are good that you probably don’t like it either. The March Badness tourney is far from the first arena the song has been publicly called out in, nor is it the first “worst song” contest it’s unwittingly entered. Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” earned the #3 spot in a 2006 CNN “Worst Song of All Time” poll, and #4 in Jimmy Guterman’s The Worst Rock n’ Roll Records of All Time. Humor columnist Dave Barry gave the song an honorable mention in his own bad song survey (later chronicled in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs) back in the 90s due to the sheer number of readers who took the time to write in and complain about it. Barry actually noted that while “I’ve Never Been to Me” might not have received the most votes, it was one of the few songs that inspired the most “intense hatred” among responders. Further evidencing this are the sheer number of personal blogs in which people have taken it upon themselves to convince the rest of the internet that Charlene’s song is one of the worst of all time.
But while many listeners can agree that “I’ve Never Been to Me” is, in fact, very bad, I was unable to find anyone who could articulate exactly how or why the song’s legacy has endured for so many decades. Why do we still remember—for better or for worse—what is, on its face, a crappy song by a woman with a short, arguably unremarkable musical career?
To answer this question, it might be important to consider the circumstances of what made Charlene famous in the first place. According to her memoir, Charlene grew up dreaming of becoming an actress or a singer. Her big chance came in 1976, when Motown signed Charlene as their first ever white artist. But the world wasn’t yet ready for “I’ve Never Been to Me.” The lyrics were too risqué, the idea of such a liberated woman (even one who ultimately learns her place) too counter to the more conservative “traditional” sensibilities of the time. Despite its great promise as a single, the song was an utter Billboard flop, barely scratching the top 100. Everyone seemed to agree Charlene had the voice, talent, and drive to sing, but it was apparent she lacked some ineffable quality one needs to successfully break away from the dreamers and become a star. Motown—and the American public—quickly lost interest in what Charlene had to offer.
Discouraged, she left Los Angeles in the early 1980s to follow her new husband, an ordinary man named Jeff, to his home country of England and found work in a local candy shop. Charlene’s dream of fame and stardom must have seemed then hopelessly beyond her reach. In another version of her life, the story might have ended here.

“I think it also helps to understand that everyone was trying to find themselves back then,” Mom says when I call her a second time. “There were all these movements, and the 70s were a time when women were becoming more independent and doing things our parents’ generation would find shocking. So women like Charlene were really bucking the system.”
I had asked Mom why she thought Charlene only became so popular five years after its initial failure. Though she admits to disliking the song and remembers laughing about it with her progressive Seattle friends when it was on the radio back in 1982, Mom is able to see “I’ve Never Been to Me” from a generous point of view I hadn’t considered, which frustrates me a little. I had wanted her perspective about what qualities she thought contributed to why the song was so bad, not its potential merits as a misguided baby step towards the third wave feminism we know today.
“But do you think Charlene was bucking the system, after all?” I ask. “Because even though she does go and lead this independent life, she ends up regretting it in the end, right? So it seems like the song is actually advocating for pretty traditional values.”
There is no question that the speaker of Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” has led a privileged and enviable life. She’s well-traveled, ostensibly wealthy, and has a lifetime of hedonistic experiences to fondly recall. But alas: she also has a problem. Between all that travel and lovemaking and champagne sipping she forgot to settle down and start a family. Now, at an advanced age (Charlene was 26 when the song was recorded), she has zero hope of finding a man who would be tolerant of her salacious past, leaving her unable to achieve something even adjacent to happiness. Like the ghosts of so many Christmas pasts, Charlene resigns herself to wandering uninvited into other women’s lives, warning them against pursuing the same freedoms, independence, and pleasures she once enjoyed. Instead, she implores women dreaming of a little excitement to appreciate the gift of their pedestrian, unfulfilling lives as housewives under the watchful eye of the patriarchy. You’ve got it made, honey, “I’ve Never Been To Me” seems to say, so plaster a smile on those cheeks! Your husband will be home soon and he’s expecting his dinner to be hot and on the table; kick off those shoes, sling that baby on your hip, and get cooking!
Mom pauses. “Yeah,” she says, “But I think the song might be more about living with regret. Like, she’s led this untraditional life and didn’t end up where she thought she would. It has that introspective quality to it. But I agree her perspective does feel dated, now.”
The song is dated, yes. But so is a lot of other music from the same era—plenty of stuff that doesn’t regularly crack the top five in “worst song” competitions, let alone merit consideration as a contender in these arenas. Why “I’ve Never Been to Me?” Why Charlene?
“Would it surprise you to hear that Charlene didn’t write the song?” I ask. “It was actually written by two men—Ron Miller and Kenny Hirsch.”
Mom laughs. “Well isn’t that typical,” she says.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge Charlene her successes, nor do I blame her for failing to recognize the more problematic aspects of “I’ve Never Been to Me.” I know she comes from a time (the 1970s) and a place (Hollywood) where a producer screaming at a woman if she doesn’t sing a better take is a motivational “kick up the butt” (Charlene’s actual words) rather than a terrifying, traumatic, or abusive experience. She may not have written the words, but Charlene does personally identify with the song’s message so strongly that she titled both her memoir and the domain for her official website after it. Though one can find many versions of the song by a variety of other singers, the legacy of “I’ve Never Been to Me” and Charlene are inextricably linked such that it is impossible to examine one without also interrogating the other.
By a divine (or perhaps cruel) stroke of luck, the push for feminism and gender equality had died down just enough in the early 80s for the public to give “I’ve Never Been to Me” another shot. A Florida radio DJ is credited with popularizing the song at the behest of his girlfriend, who was one of Charlene’s few fans the first time around. Almost overnight, Charlene had become famous. She took the first plane back to the states to promote the song and for several months her life resembled the stardom she had fantasized about as a child, replete with frenzied fans begging for autographs, fancy dinners paid for by the record label, and meet-and-greets with all the most idolized musicians of the day. But her fame was ultimately short lived; Motown had ensnared Charlene in an exploitative contract, and she would go on to take home less than $13,000 from the rerelease of her song. As that money began to run out, Charlene knew she would need another hit if she was going to establish herself in the industry as more than just a one-hit wonder.
Charlene hinged her second-chance career on a new song, also written by Ron Miller, entitled “Used to Be.” She was thrilled to have the opportunity to record the piece as a duet with none other than Stevie Wonder. True to his name, Wonder was a national sensation and every song he touched seemed to turn to gold. If anything could solidify her status as a serious musical artist, Charlene thought, it would be the success of this next song. But fate clearly had other plans. “Used to Be” peaked at a tepid #46 position on US charts and was banned outright on UK airwaves (yes, really) because of such unfortunate lyrics as:

Have another Chivas Regal
You’re twelve years old and sex is legal
Your parents don’t know where or who you are

This mistake would mark the beginning of the end for Charlene’s zombie-like career. In her memoir, she recounts this disappointment with particular bitterness. In the music business, you rarely get a second chance, and here she had squandered hers with a song that, on paper at least, should have been an easy hit. But even Stevie Wonder wasn’t enough to save “Used to Be” from itself. Charlene reports feeling shocked anyone would think the lyrics sexualized children, writing, “people misinterpreted it and thought we were condoning sex for 12-year-olds for God’s sake,” though, it should be noted, she does not offer a convincing alternate interpretation.
Charlene would never again record a song that broke the top 100. But despite the ever-mounting odds against her, Charlene has never once stopped chasing her next comeback. The final chapters of her memoir detail a series of increasingly desperate schemes to become relevant once again, including releasing a 2008 dance mix of “I’ve Never Been to Me” and touring the gay nightclub circuit for extra cash, at times sleeping in her car because she couldn’t afford the price of a hotel for the night. She admits this relentless pursuit of fame has caused strain on her relationship with her husband and daughters, but she still hasn’t given up on her dream of reclaiming her career with another hit. Her memoir concludes with this heartbreaking self-assessment:
“I look back on everything I’ve been through in my life with a sweet sadness…You sit there and childishly think that things are going to last and last, but they’re not. People are going to die, things are going to disappear, and songs will be forgotten. But there has to come a time when I will wake up, look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Hey lady, you lady, I’ve been to paradise and now I’ve finally been to me.’ So I’d better start living my life before it’s too late.”
The irony in this, of course, is that it’s already too late. The book is over. Charlene, the heroine of this story, hasn’t found what she’s spent the better part of her life searching for. She’s lived the glamorous lifestyle of a star as well as the realities of a motherhood her song’s narrator so wishes could be hers, yet still, despite all of this, Charlene is left feeling unfulfilled. Who is to blame for this tragic outcome? Was it “I’ve Never Been to Me” that doomed Charlene to this Groundhog Day-esque cycle, forever trying and failing to find herself amid lofty goals of celebrity and fame? Or is it that Charlene’s short-lived fame could only ever have hinged on the improbable success of such an insufferable song? While we may never know the answer, one thing is clear. Though her 2017 memoir does not acknowledge this, Charlene’s song continues to thrive well beyond its expected lifespan in the spirit of competitions like this one. Unwittingly, Charlene has established a legacy for herself after all, but the cruel paradox of this recognition is a kind of attention she didn’t ask for and likely doesn’t appreciate.

“One more question, Mom,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says.
“Have you ever been to Me?”
“Oh god,” she laughs. “Who has time for that? I can find myself when I’m dead.”

The endurance of “I’ve Never Been to Me”—and, by extension, of Charlene—represents a kind of celebration of failure that should be familiar to all of us. In this way, Charlene’s “Me” becomes a metaphor for the impossible standard each of us privately holds for ourselves. A standard so high we have little chance of ever meeting, let alone exceeding, our own expectations—whether as writers, as parents, or as good people. As Confucius once said: no matter where you go, there you are. This is perhaps the most relatable thing about Charlene as an artist, and also what makes the song a cultural icon that habitually creeps into so many “worst song” tournaments. This is what makes “I’ve Never Been to Me” the bad song we love to hate. Because underlying its dated “feminist” sentiments, its not-so-subtle anti-abortion rhetoric, and more problematic stereotypes about motherhood than I can reasonably deconstruct in just one essay, is a song that doesn’t just look back and reflect on what it means to live with regrets. Rather, the song, much like Charlene herself, commands our attention with a sincerity so insistent, so grotesque, and so uncanny that we are all but forced to reckon with it. This is how “I’ve Never Been to Me” has stood the test of time. After more than forty years and against all odds it’s still here, damnit, and here it will stay, immortalized in our hearts and minds until each one of us—Charlene included—succumbs to the overwhelming relief of a death sweeter than any paradise.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the co-editor of its forthcoming anthology, entitled The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Find her online at zoebossiere.com or on Twitter @zoebossiere