When You Can’t Escape ‘Empire State of Mind’

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty, Roc Nation Records

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Mariel Blatt was handing out brochures for & Juliet under a tunnel of scaffolding near 42nd and Broadway while a throng of passersby did their best to avoid eye contact. Blatt had chosen the spot pretty deliberately. She wasn’t trying to maximize foot traffic, which is heavy almost everywhere around Times Square. She was trying to avoid “Empire State of Mind.” “It’s annoying as fuck!” Blatt says. “Everyone, when they hear it, they’re like, ‘We’re moving.’”

Well, not everyone. Tourists eat it up. In the 15 years since it was first released as the third single on Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3, the song has been a go-to for the extensive fleet of midtown pedicabs and tour buses. It’s played on the Staten Island Ferry and by vendors on the Brooklyn Bridge. It has been used as walk-up music for Yankee captains and New York mayors. And in Times Square, where a dense orchestra of honking horns, idling motors, chattering tourists, and voluble vendors can push sound levels north of 90 decibels, the song’s unmistakable tinny beat and pogoing piano loop manage to cut through the din. “If you don’t know to consciously avoid it, you’ll hear it at least, like, 25 times,” says Blatt, who, for the record, liked the song before she had to listen to it all the time at work.

Angela Hunte, who co-wrote ”Empire State of Mind” with Janet Sewell-Ulepic, says she wanted the song to evoke strong feelings, though she maybe didn’t anticipate its psychological impact on the city’s tourism-adjacent workers. “I don’t want someone to say, ‘Ah, that’s cool,’ or ‘Yeah, that’s all right,’” says Hunte. “I want, ‘I hate it’ or ‘I love it.’ It makes everything feel bigger.” Hunte and Sewell-Ulepic — from Brooklyn and New Jersey, respectively — wrote the initial demo while in London, working with the producer Al Shux on a song for Sting and one of his daughters. While it wasn’t really the assignment, Hunte wanted to “write something about New York.” She convinced Shux to show her some chords he was working on for a separate project, and inspiration struck. “We kind of just started blurting out, ‘Concrete jungle …’ It all came out literally in ten minutes.”

The song, obviously, didn’t end up with Sting (though there was a moment when it seemed as though it might). Instead, well … you probably know. “Empire State of Mind” is one of two definitive New York anthems, and this past summer, it went diamond, meaning it has sold or streamed at least 10 million units. And its popularity has shown no signs of waning: Streams of the song in New York City have nearly doubled on Spotify since 2020. “It’s a part of the landscape now,” Hunte says, “like any of our iconic buildings, this is now a part of who we are.”

Particularly if you’ve got a job in midtown, it seems. “When I first started working here, hearing it all the time was really irritating,” says Jay, a 34-year-old actor-comedian who works in the area. “But at this point, it blends in with all the other noise.” When Jay, who’s from Philadelphia, does think about the song, though, he thinks about how its aspirational message obscures the reality of life in the city: Work is a grind, everything is expensive. As it turns out, there’s a lot you can’t do in New York. “Now I know that everything in the song is a lie,” he says. “When I hear it, I always just look at the random tourists getting on one of the little pedi-bike cabs and having the best time of their life,” adds his colleague, Nini, who grew up in Brooklyn. “And I’m like, ‘Sure, have your fake generic New York moment. But you have no idea.’”

But the fantasy endures. “I play this song every day, ten hours a day,” says Amir, 19, who has been operating a rotating 360-degree selfie platform for the past two years. “The tourists like this song.” (Amir, as you may expect, is tired of it.)

The selfie platforms are mostly found on Broadway between 47th and 49th, near the red steps that Alicia Keys and Jay-Z helped make famous by dancing on them in the “Empire State of Mind” music video. They emerged a couple years ago, and the videos they produce have become popular on social media. For $25, you can dance around as you concentrically float before a backdrop of bright jumbo screen ads for Sephora, the Back to the Future musical, and veganism. The resulting videos do feel a little larger than life. There’s a reason the song has endured, after all. When Ronald and Kate, a middle-age couple from Belgium, finish dancing and swiveling, Ronald tells me they chose “Empire State of Mind” for their video because “I like the song. It’s a happy song. Powerful.”

“It is a concrete jungle,” adds Kate. “In Belgium, we have small buildings.”