“It’s Time for an Overdue Land Acknowledgement: We Built This City on Rock and Roll”
Thank you for granting me this time to speak on behalf of This City’s Historical Society during the public comments portion of this This City City Council meeting. In recent years, we have all confronted painful truths about our shared past and how they inform our present. This City is no exception, and it is with no small degree of difficulty that I inform you we built This City on rock and roll. I am not referring to This City’s City Song, but the burial ground of rock and roll itself!
This revelation came as a shock. As a lover of rock music, I don’t consider the genre “dead,” though it has experienced peaks and valleys of popularity and artistic merit over the decades. Even so, this burial site is quite real. This past weekend the This City Historical Society saw it for ourselves after community activists brought it to our attention. Sifting through the detritus of half-remembered bands and musicians brought tears to our eyes and shudders of embarrassment as we realized, “Hey. I had that album.” Seeing is believing, and we must never stop believin’.
Does “Wherever You Will Go” by The Calling come to mind? Many of you likely coughed up the average fifteen dollars it would have cost to obtain the album Camino Palmero it appears on prior to the era of downloading and streaming. Can any of us name another song off that record? What about “Hey There, Delilah?” I see a few of you recoiling. Is it painful to remember you once enjoyed listening to a band called Plain White T’s? Discarded copies of the works of Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, and nineties-era Bon Jovi were found as well. However, no copies of that last band’s 2000 album Crush were seen. You know, the one that had “It’s My Life?” That’s less of a guilty pleasure for most of us, even if I personally think Bon Jovi suck.
Remains were not limited to rock music. “I Wish” by Skee-Lo was seen, as were the discographies of Vanilla Ice, Color Me Badd, Kris Kross, 98 Degrees, and Kid N’ Play. From the eighties, the collected works of Richard Marx, Gary Numan, and The Go-Go’s were present. One of the oldest records was a copy of The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” a song that topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks in 1969 and was the most successful single of that year. This was the same year as Abbey Road and the Woodstock Festival! Ladies and gentlemen, we bestowed a degree of superior commercial success on a group of cartoon characters than we did on the greatest band that ever existed and an epoch moment of the 1960s counterculture. I have no words.
We must atone for these atrocities, but how? After discussing the matter with community activists of This City, we’ve decided the first thing would be reconsidering “We Built This City” as This City’s official song. Like two other ubiquitous anthems of the 1980s (“Born in the USA” and “Rockin’ in The Free World”), we’ve only been listening to the chorus. “We built this city” is repeated no less than forty-two times in a song lasting just under five minutes, but a cursory Google search reveals its status as a troubling tale of corporate oppression and urban blight. It even contains a direct reference to police using chokeholds! Do I need to explain why that’s problematic?
After returning home, I dusted off my extensive CD collection, neglected for nearly twenty years. When I saw my Hootie and the Blowfish, Eve 6, and Natalie Imbruglia records, I knew I had no choice except to come here tonight. I too am obligated to learn from our history. The This City Historical Society will be honored to work with the This City City Council and This City community activists to see that these forgotten, unremarkable recordings of years past are given the record company contractually mandated memorial they deserve. It’s the least we can do, along with admitting we still stream this stuff on Spotify regularly. Thank you.