I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings.
At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather.
The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes that chemical skin peel you’ve been targeted for on Instagram look pleasant.
New York does sleep. And thank goodness it does. Because living here is exhausting
And it was through this landscape of icy despair that I was recently walking, when the snide algorithm on my phone’s music app decided what I really needed to hear was Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes.” If you’re familiar with the lyrics, you might recall that the woman in the song has hair that is “Harlow gold,” lips that are “a sweet surprise” and hands that are “never cold.” But most offensively, she is “as pure as New York snow.” Pure snow! Imagine!
After I’d finished scoffing, I started to think: what other musical crimes have been committed against New York City? What other egregious misrepresentations have been made under the guise of poetic license? Once I started paying attention, the deceptions piled up like the snowbanks – layered and dirty. Is New York the most musically lied-about city in the world?
Let’s start where we have to, with Frank Sinatra, patron saint of “Your dreams will come true if you step off a Greyhound in Midtown.” He croons that this is the city that “doesn’t sleep.” I’ve seen entire subway cars asleep at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. I’ve seen people slumbering on park benches and in office bathrooms. There’s always someone conked out by the Duane Reade near my apartment. New York does sleep and thank goodness it does. Living here is exhausting. Amid the all-night sirens and the radiators in the prewar buildings that make that horrible clacking sound, we need to seize the opportunity for shut-eye whenever we can.
There’s the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” a ballad that I unabashedly adore but one that would also have you believe the city is a twinkling backdrop for romantic dysfunction, where even the drunk tank sparkles with possibility. Sting, in “Englishman in New York,” portrays a city that is a quaint, quirky wonderland of civilized eccentrics quaffing coffee. Bless him. Of course, the eccentrics are still here, only they’re now shouting at traffic cones.
Thanks to Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind,” I’ve waited six years to feel “brand new,” but the streets have mostly made me feel wary of stepping in dog poop. Do the “big lights” inspire me? Sometimes, but I’m also concerned about unnecessary energy consumption. Climate change, anyone?
Taylor Swift told us that New York’s been waiting for us. Patience is not a character trait I’d associate with this city. And what, exactly, is a “New York State of Mind?” For me it’s a nonstop push and pull of wanting to get the hell out and never ever wanting to leave: a recipe for constant existential angst and emotional vertigo. Is that what you meant by that, Billy Joel?
The greatest lie of all might be the musical insistence that New York is a place where dreams magically crystallize. Sometimes they do, but at least in winter, nothing crystallizes here like the disappointment of another day of sub-freezing temperatures.
Still, the songs keep coming with their promises and whatever chord progression you need to get out of bed in the morning. I can’t help listening to them and loving them, and maybe that’s the trick: lies dressed up as hope. The alternative might be a mass exodus to Miami. And that would be really sad.
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