Empire State Of Mind

Am I the only one who inserts the name of my own city into the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys New York anthem? 'London' obviously flows a bit better than 'Toronto,' but you can pronounce the latter as 'Tron-to' and it still fits. This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why should I favour New York over either my birthplace or the city in which I spend half of the year? Does New York have a Stobey's Pizza? Does New York have a giant hippo-shaped bus that takes you on an unsatisfactory tour of the downtown area? Hell no to both. Show some local pride, people --- and that goes for not just Londoners or Torontonians but to people living everywhere from Fredricton to Frankfurt. Why go along with Jay-Keys' propaganda? Big lights can inspire you just as well in, say, Kincardine as they can in NYC. Of course, the big lights in Kincardine might not be from skyscrapers but rather the Bruce Nuclear Plant, but still.

BONUS LINK: A kids' school choir performs the song. (The New York version, not the Kincardine version.) This is somewhat hipper than my grade school choir days, when the hippest we got was singing "Rock Around The Clock."