In Nas' hip-hop classic 'NY State of Mind,' the city's ghetto neighborhoods are like mazes with 'black rats trapped.' The city becomes a terrifying place, as he writes, 'I think of crime when I'm in a New York state of mind.'īut once again, even the challenge of the criminality of New York has its promises. Would he have a hundred guns and a hundred clips if he was living elsewhere? In his 2004 song 'New York,' Ja Rule talks about having 'a hundred guns, a hundred clips' just ''cause from New York.' The way he phrases it makes you think. Meanwhile, for rappers Nas and Ja Rule, the two faces of New York become even more pronounced as the city becomes the arena for the most extreme kind of gangster wars. Similarly, Billy Joel's piano song 'New York State of Mind' depicts New York as the only place where a singer can capture the true essence of the 'rhythm and blues,' even if that essence sounds pretty melancholy. The jazz classic 'Autumn in New York,' for example, most famously performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, describes that season in the city as one offering the 'promise of love,' yet it is also 'mingled with pain' of missed chances and love lost. And this is the New York of so many iconic songs. This is the New York of the Ellis Island immigrant dream, the New York that has been luring in ambitious young people from the country for 200 years. That mythology is essentially a mythology of a city that offers great challenges and equally great opportunities. Especially in the self-conscious allusion to Frank Sinatra's 'New York, New York,' with the recapitulation of the famous lines:Īnd Jay-Z grounds himself in classical New York mythology. The verses of 'Empire State of Mind' are littered with specific details from Jay's biography, from shout-outs to his wife Beyoncé Knowles-'BK is from Texas'-to his trendsetting adornment of the Yankee hat, right down to a mention of a real address he once lived at, 'my stash spot, 560 State Street.'Īt the same time, Jay's New York, and the New York Alicia Keys sings about in the hook, is the same glittering metropolis of hopes and dreams that can be found in so many other songs. On one level, Jay-Z's New York is his New York.

The city at the heart of the song is both a real, gritty place and an idealized, flashy dream. What makes each of those songs so powerful-and what makes Jay-Z's 'Empire State of Mind' such a worthy successor to the crown-is the combination of the deeply personal and the universally iconic. The A-list of old-school New York anthems might include the jazz standard 'Autumn in New York,' Frank Sinatra's legendary 'New York, New York,' and Billy Joel's classic piano song 'New York State of Mind.' From the hip-hop generation we have Nas' similarly titled but otherwise rather different 'NY State of Mind,' Ja Rule's 'New York,' and the Beastie Boys' 'No Sleep Till Brooklyn,' among many, many more. While tons of those songs are pretty obscure-'We Are New York and We Love Basketball' by Paulette LaMelle, anyone?-there's no denying that over the years we've seen plenty of top-notch New York songs from top-drawer New York artists. Wikipedia's less-than-definitive ' List of Songs About New York City' includes nearly a thousand titles. There's just something about New York City that inspires song, apparently. Over the years, the Big Apple has inspired countless odes and lyrics in its honor. Is 'Empire State of Mind' a new anthem-maybe even the new anthem-for New York City?

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