by KEND on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:23 pm
As a resident of New York for over 40 years I have to say WTF is going on here. taylor swift, a minimally talented pop star with gift for self promotion is carpet bagger who puts bobby and hilary to shame. I guess if you put money in the right places you can buy anything, we knew that was true of congess and the senate and the courts, That a great city has to pander to the puerile shallow tweenie queen is beyond reprehensible, its embarrassing. Please taylor Go and find another kennedy, Rockefeller or maybe a lord.
Some comments from the NYTimes
Taylor Swift has been named a Global Welcome Ambassador for New York City a week after the release of her single “Welcome To New York” — but for many listeners (and viewers of the surrounding publicity campaign), her depiction of the city is neither particularly accurate nor particularly enticing.
“Surprise!” writes Tessa Stuart at The Village Voice. “That wasn’t a single we were all listening to last week — it was a commercial.”
She links the song with a multipronged New York-promotion effort, including Instagram posts starting last week (like this latte) and a series of videos praising various aspects of New York life (one of which also features a latte). She also questions Ms. Swift’s beverage choice: “A latte is not like a slice of pizza, or a bagel, or a pickle back, which is to say it is not a quintessentially, or even an overtly, New York foodstuff.” And she writes:
“Some people might look at all this and say Swift is a marketing genius with an eye for ~ S y N e R g Y ~ …Others (us) will say she’s a cyborg sent to this planet to convince people without ideas to drink Diet Coke, and shop at Target, and move to New York.”
At Gawker, Dayna Evans takes a dim view of the promotion (which, she notes, includes Taylor Swift defining the word “bodega”):
“I’m not sure who comes off worse in this public relations horror: New York City or Taylor Swift. When affordable housing is near impossible to come by and as monolith branded-cool companies push out arts communities and while entitled rich children run through the streets proclaiming ownership over everything and while minority arrests continue for low-level crimes, the least (or most?) likely choice for the promotion of a city with equal problems and triumphs is a whitebread out-of-towner who says, ‘Hey, don’t think about those scary, unjust things! Let’s talk about that night we stayed out late dancing instead!’”
And, she writes: “Her version of a 300-square-mile area, the most densely populated city in America, can be flattened into a good latte in the East Village and delivered via iconic yellow taxi cab a whole 10 blocks without paying tip. If anyone represents a New York not worth actually visiting, it’s the musician behind ‘Welcome to New York,’ a song as welcoming as the cluster of billboards cupping the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey.”
Others have leveled similar criticisms at the song. At The Village Voice, David Colon writes:
“‘Welcome to New York’ celebrates as generic, flat, and lifeless a New York as has ever existed in pop culture. Think about the song, and try to pick out a single detail about the city. You can’t. Replace ‘New York’ in the lyrics with ‘Des Moines,’ with ‘L.A.,’ with ‘Pittsburgh,’ any city you can shoehorn into the beat, and you wouldn’t have to change a single detail. Taylor Swift’s idea of New York is as boring as any rich, sheltered person’s idea about it, but the difference is that most of them don’t get to sing about it.”
And at Jezebel, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd calls Ms. Swift’s single “a gentrification anthem so obtuse it makes one wonder if she is, in fact, trolling at this point.”
“Swift didn’t move to one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. to ‘make it,’” Ms. Shepherd writes, “she moved because she’d already ‘made it.’” As a point of contrast, she offers Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind”:
“Sure, they’re both millionaires now, but there’s a sense of struggle behind it, a sense of loving this city despite itself. A mean street you learn to love, as opposed to a playground for the happy-go-lucky and effortlessly moneyed. ‘The lights will inspire you,’ sings Alicia Keys, just after Jay Z talks about cooking and pushing crack as his hardscrabble origin story — at the very least, it’s aspirational. As opposed to Swift’s ‘The lights are so bright, but they never blind me.’ Of course they don’t.”