To promote her new pop album 1989, Taylor Swift is releasing one song at a time.
The latest of these gifts from the Swift is 1989 album-opening “Welcome to New York,” a pop song about Swift’s liberating move to New York City, a move she talked about extensively in a recent Rolling Stone interview. Swift released 30 seconds of the song in a preview video. There are also full versions of the song available on the home of Swift’s most devoted fans, Tumblr.
The song is also Swift’s attempt to come at Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” and displace it as the unofficial anthem of New York. This is a very bold, but completely logical, move by Swift.
And it is going to work.
AP Photo
Now, Swift hasn’t said anything about Jay-Z or “Empire State of Mind” or anything really at all about the song, other than that New York inspired her to write it.
“The inspiration that I found in that city is kind of hard to describe and hard to compare to any other force of inspiration I’ve ever experienced in my life,” she said in an appearance on Good Morning America.
Everything about the song, though, seems calculated to become the next New York anthem. There are the lyrics of the hook, the repetitive “Welcome to New York!” sung over and over again. I can picture the New York DJs now throwing the song on and watching the young, dancing people screaming the words back to them.
You can picture this, too. Don’t try to fight it, either. This is happening, whether any of us want it to or not.
This is not a difficult or complex song. It is pulsing synths and easy lyrics that take the standard “I’m a young person just trying to make it in the big city!” narrative and reduces it like a wine sauce, until there’s nothing left but sweet and sticky syrup. This isn’t rocket science; it’s a pop song.
Still, it works. It works because Taylor Swift is the kind of artist that doesn’t care — at all — thatthe “I’m a young person who just moved to New York!” narrative is a tired cliché. She justlived it: She moved to New York, and she felt her life was changed by moving to the big city.
Sure, she’s a millionaire and can’t walk anywhere without a horde of paparazzi following her, but she identifies with the same story as the 22-year-old girl from Topeka who just moved into a crummy apartment in Bed-Stuy. New York changed Taylor Swift, just like it changed everyone else.
Swift could not care less that the story has been told ten thousand times because it’s her story, and she’s going to sing about it in a way that every other person in the country is going to want to sing along.
This is going to be the next New York anthem. Don’t fight it. It’s already over.
