Why ‘Empire State of Mind’ is so good

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Even if you’ve grown tired of the usual lousy top-40 radio fare, it’s been difficult recently to ignore the ubiquity of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” a track featuring Alicia Keys that slowly grew to be the dominant song of 2009.

And now some are wondering whether it’ll replace “New York, New York” as this generation’s lasting tribute to the city.

From the L.A. Times:

Other than suggesting that an anthem usually embodies some measure of hope, [John] Kander [co-writer of “New York, New York”] could not — and would not — attempt to explain what makes a city connect with a certain song; he merely pointed out that “Empire State of Mind” has as much of a chance of enjoying another 30 years of popularity as his did 30 years ago. “It doesn’t matter what I think or what the critics say,” says Kander. “It’s what people think and feel and hang on to.”

And doesn’t every city dweller wish their town had song just like it? (Even if most of us missed Jay-Z’s confusing allusion to the price he pays for a kilo of cocaine.) Everyone wants to sing a song that actually makes the often sprawling, sometimes lonely North American metropolises feel like small neighborhoods.

From CNN:

“It had been a while since a song filled New Yorkers with as much pride as this one does,” said M. Tye Comer, the executive editor of Billboard.com. “I think people from other cities are seeing this, and there is an envy of that. They want to take a piece of that and bring it to their city.”

Here, for example, is the Toronto re-make:

Meh. Nothing against Toronto, but it isn’t the same, is it? And not because it’s not Hova and Alicia. There’s just something missing, something that high production and fuzzy shots of twinkling city lights can’t quite replicate.

I haven’t spent much time in New York City, but I have spent a lot of time in other major cities, and it doesn’t take a genius to know that what they all share that others lack is really quite simple: a soul. Which is why it was so painful for everyone, not just New Yorkers, to watch the heart of a great city ripped out almost ten years ago. If you grew up in North America, New York City has always been the place where things happened: music, movies, fashion, Sesame Street. If you lived in the rest of the world, New York has always been the gateway to, well, making it. There are few places like it, if any.

So it sort of seems fitting that at the end of a decade that began with such a destructive assault on North America’s favorite city, the last big hit we’ll remember from the ‘00s is a song that reminds us why it’s a place worth caring about.