Starship – Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now
1987
2.9M Likes
Best comments
1.“If there's one decade where men and women had the same hairstyle, it was the '80s.”
More comments
- 2.“Doctor: You have 4 minutes to live. Me: Play 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now.' Doctor: But it's 4:30. God: It's OK.”
- 3.“It's 1984, late autumn. My girlfriend got a job at O'Hare on 2nd shift. I'd go meet her on her break, and we'd lay on the hood of my car together watching the jets take off. Almost 40 years later, we're still together... and I still own the car.”
The story
This song was written for a movie about a guy who falls in love with a department-store dummy. Mannequin, 1987: Andrew McCarthy as the lovesick window dresser, Kim Cattrall as the mannequin who comes to life. Diane Warren and Albert Hammond got the assignment, and Hammond built it from an idea he'd started as a wedding song for himself. A long divorce had kept him from marrying his partner of seven years, and the defiance in the chorus is his.
The video plays the movie twice. Clips from Mannequin cut against a parallel story where Mickey Thomas falls for a mannequin that comes alive, played by Grace Slick. Meshach Taylor drops in as Hollywood Montrose, his flamboyant window dresser from the film, and producer Narada Michael Walden hangs out with the band. The twist at the end: the band were mannequins too.
It hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 4, 1987 – Starship's third and last chart-topper and the first of Diane Warren's career. It spent four weeks at the top in the UK, where only Never Gonna Give You Up outsold it that year. Slick, at 47, became the oldest woman to top the Hot 100 at the time (Cher later took the record at 52). It got an Oscar nomination too, and lost to The Time of My Life. In 2024 the video passed 500 million views, and in 2025 Marvel used the song for Thunderbolts*. From Jefferson Airplane to a department-store window. Nothing stopped her.
