Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (Starship) – day 3
The eighties were most certainly a decade of change for music, so imagine how it must have been for longtime bands who were still writing and producing music since the late sixties but were doing their best to stay relevant and heard? Off the top of my head, Heart was probably the most successful in this endeavor, reinventing their sound AND their look to fold right into the neon norms and the MTV culture. But Ann & Nancy didn’t need to change the name of their band to keep up with the race of time the way Jefferson Airplane, no wait, Jefferson Starship, no wait, Starship did. And by the time this song was released in 1987, it really did feel like nothing was gonna stop them. Not now or ever.
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now is the kind of song that you either love or hate (as are, I guess, most of the songs on my illustrious countdowns.). And as is commonplace for me, I went through that period when I couldn’t stand this song. I mean, if it were on in the background, I wouldn’t necessarily cringe, but I certainly wouldn’t play it on repeat the way I would most other songs I love.
And then came a moody comedy film called The Skeleton Twins starring Saturday Night Live alumni Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. You go into it thinking it’s gonna be this uproarious farce and you end up leaving it thinking about life and death and love. Somewhere between familial breakdowns, the siblings rekindle their joy with a lip-sync battle to this amazing Starship song, and you can really believe that everything can be right again in the world.
While the original video is from some frighteningly terrible movie about a living mannequin and the man who loves her, starring Samantha from Sex and the City and the most unsexual member of the Brat Pak, this link will show you the scene about which I’ve referred in this blog, and the song might stay in your head today because it’s a great song, simple as that. Oh, and it has a pretty great message, too.
And if this world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other. Nothing’s gonna stop us now.