Poll: The worst song of the 1980s is…

To cleanse the palate, a shameless piece of traffic bait aimed at launching a thousand nostalgically contentious arguments in the comments.

Contrary to popular belief, my friends, the polls do sometimes get it right.

Let’s face it — the 1980s gave us a lot of bad, cheesy and embarrassing music. But is the worst song the decade of Rubik’s cubes and leg warmers produced really the #1 hit “We Built This City” by Starship? It is, according to the readers of Rolling Stone.

The magazine asked its readers to vote in an online poll for the most horrifyingly bad songs of the ’80s, and Starship came out on top — by a huge margin. According to the magazine, it was “what could be the biggest blow-out victory in the history of the Rolling Stone Readers Poll.”

Follow the link for the rest of the top 10; numbers two and six are personal favorites, and number 10 really should have been number one. The wrinkle here, obviously, is that these songs are ratable now only because they were catchy enough to endure in our collective memory. The Starship tune, while dreck, is something 90 percent of you my age could hum if asked. Besides, is it really any worse than the latest excrescence from the Black Eyes Peas? I ask you.

Here’s a long-distance dedication to the Occupy Wall Street crowd, who are indeed knee-deep in the hoopla (and dreck). Corporations are always playing corporation games, man.

Update: Whatever you think of the song, this is clearly the worst video of the 80s.

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