Song of the Day: Alicia Keys – New York (Empire State of Mind, Part II)

I definitely wanted to give my version of it and my vision of how I see New York and how it feels to me. I wanted to do it for my style—more broken down, more on piano, more voice and intimacy—so that’s what I did. I imagined, ‘If I was able to sing this whole song, how would I do it?’ So I just sat down at my piano and I kind of broke it down and started singing about New York as I see it, and it turned out great.

Alicia Keys

I’m not at all familiar with Alicia Keys’s catalogue, but after hearing this – it was attached to, of all things, a recent substack post by economist Paul Krugman – I’m thinking I ought to be. An elaboration on her own contribution to the Jay Z hit Empire State of Mind, this has to be among the prettiest and most heartfelt of what is, by now, a huge collection of songs that pay loving tribute to the Big Apple. I love the cascading, descending piano lines, and boy oh boy can that lady sing. Not a trace of vibrato.

It’s the perfect soundtrack, actually, to layer over my own fond memories of my first visit to the city in the late 1990s, which never would have occurred but for the urgings of my wife, who was there on business when she phoned me one evening. “Everywhere I turn, I look at something and think Graeme has got to see this“, she told me. “It’s not what you’re expecting”. When she’d set out for what I assumed was still the dangerous, apparently decaying urban hellscape of the 1970s and 80s, I was anxious. My impressions of New York had been shaped by movies like Death Wish, news stories about the Son of Sam and the incredible murder rate (over 2,200 murders in 1989!), reports of it being more than your life was worth to even set foot in Central Park, horror stories about what happened to unwary tourists who strayed into Times Square, memories of the city going bankrupt, and of 1977’s “Night of the Animals”, when all hell broke loose in the wake of a city-wide power outage. I told her to be extra careful, maybe stick to the hotel, and for God’s sake don’t stroll around gawking at things like a tourist, because the thugs will spot you a mile away and rip you to pieces. Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t look anybody in the eyes. Leave your valuables in the hotel safe. Keep your head on a swivel. “It’s not like that at all”, she said. “It’s wonderful. Trust me. You’ll love it.”

She was, of course, absolutely right. I did love it. The architecture. The gloriously refurbished Grand Central Station, which was a cathedral with a golden zodiac painted across its vast ceiling, nothing like the butt-strewn, garbage cluttered, plus-sized public lavatory of my mind’s eye. The wonder, repeated several times an hour, of being somewhere, and seeing something, that you’d known about all your life, seen in magazines, in movies, and on TV, read about in novels, heard sung about in innumerable songs; holy crap, that’s the Chrysler Building! That’s the Empire State! This is 42nd Street! Broadway! The Flatiron Building! The Brill Building! The Brooklyn Bridge! The Dakota! Rockefeller Center! Lincoln Center! The World Trade Center! Radio City Freaking Music Hall! Hey – that must be the Staten Island Ferry! Times Square was like Disneyland, and safe as milk, and Central Park was a never-ending delight, not merely bereft of any obvious danger, but beautiful beyond words, and stuffed full of unexpected artifacts (like an obelisk from ancient Egypt!), artwork, eateries, and wide open spaces, including a huge commons and an artificial lake (the same one Dustin Hoffman was running beside in Marathon Man). We visited the Natural History Museum, the Met, the Guggenheim, the New York Public Library, and concluded one afternoon sipping a cold beer in the courtyard sculpture garden nestled within MOMA, watching the Sun go down over the towers of Manhattan. I was overwhelmed. The sheer, fantastic majesty of the place, it felt just like what it pretty much was, the centre of the Universe, and made Toronto seem, upon our return, like a provincial backwater, a cow town with pathetically unfulfilled aspirations to world class status. You want world class? Man, I’ve seen world class, and this ain’t it.

All you need to know about Donald Trump and his miserable MAGA cronies is that the witless bastards despise New York. All evidence to the contrary, they still see it the way I thought it was before I went there and had my eyes opened. They’re afraid of it, envy it, and want you to believe that it isn’t “the real America”, by which they mean it’s full of immigrants and home to every ethnicity under the Sun.

They should listen to Alicia:

Baby, I’m from New York
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothin’ you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand-new
Big lights will inspire you
Hear it for New York, New York, New York

One hand in the air for the big city
Street lights, big dreams, all lookin’ pretty
No place in the world that can compare
Put your lighters in the air
Everybody say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”!

I do, too. I say Yeah.

As things stand I don’t want to go anywhere near Trump’s America, but it’s hard to hold to that when it means I might never again visit New York. After all, they didn’t elect the orange mutant, and it’s not his town, he doesn’t belong there any more, even if he does maintain his gaudy midtown tower on 5th Avenue. Maybe MAGA is on to something, in a way. NYC sure as shit isn’t their America. But the real America? You’re damned right it’s the real America. And someday, if Donald and his legion of dark and evil grey men are ever thrown from power, you can bet that New York City will have had something to do with it.