This week, New York’s official tourism bureau named Taylor Swift as its Global Welcome Ambassador based on the civic merits of her latest single from 1989, “Welcome to New York.” The city, sings Swift, has “been waiting for you”, before rattling off the usual tropes associated with the metropolis: that thrilling moment of “when we first dropped our bags on apartment floors”, late-night ventures to the Village, post-U.S. vs. Windsor acceptance (“And you can want who you want/ Boys and boys and girls and girls”). Of course, like any new kid in town, she glosses over the markers of city life that reveal themselves with every inflated rent check and MetroCard swipe. Swift doesn’t mention the fact that, were it not for her heft security detail, she’d probably be getting a different kind of New York hospitality.
Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t get into some of the cities finer points--the smell of hot trash in the summer, or the zombie-like hordes of Elmo impersonators stalking Times Square. Swift keeps it glossy, kinetic, and just a little bit vague – and really, would the tourism bureau want it any other way? New York City’s predominant musical narratives – George M. Cohan's “Send My Regards to Broadway”, Frank Sinatra's “New York, New York”, Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” – cast it as a glimmering bastion for hope, opportunity, and success (Jay-Z’s New York love story contains a dark past, but it never threatens his present).
Like the typical New Yorker, the mainstream Gotham canon does its best to divert its attention from the things it’d rather not see: panhandlers on the street, rats in the bodega, police brutality. But when handled with eloquence and musical savvy, dissent has a way of finding its voice. And so, in 1991, the late British songstress Kirsty MacColl enjoyed a modest hit with “Walking Down Madison”, a subtle, scathing takedown of the city’s neon facade co-written with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and rapper Aniff Cousins. Like Swift, MacColl arrives in the city a spectator, but she’s not hanging out at some plushy Tribeca apartment; she's taking the listener on a different sort of trek through NYC as it was then. We see the bag ladies freezing to death in the park, the “beaming boy from Harlem with the air force coat” from whom one averts their eyes without asking why, the man with a knife on the A train – each stark image arriving one after the other, a different block each beat. Not quite a musical version of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, it brushes against the same inconvenient truth: “It’s not that far." Long before citizens' collective panic over gentrification and the collision of once-distant communities, “Walking Down Madison” had detailed New York’s growing stratification with clarity.
It's understandable that “Welcome To New York” would get chosen as a greeting to prospective visitors, a lure; “Welcome To New York” an ode to the blinding gleam of the post-Bloomberg era. Everyone has a best side, cities included, and lyrics about a mother dumpster-diving to feed her child probably won’t sell too many double-decker bus tours. It comes down to a simple question: when it comes to the musical representation America’s of most emblematic city, what do we prize: the symbol itself or the communities which sustain them? To quote the chorus of “Walking Down Madison": “Would you like to see some more?/ I can show you if you’d like to”.