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I have to say that the New York Racing Association's selection of "Empire State of Mind" to replace "New York, New York" as the theme of the Belmont Stakes was an even dumber decision than it seemed at first blush.
I must admit, I didn't know the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys song just by its name. I had to look it up, give it a listen, and hunt down the lyrics before commenting. (And I actually missed the race today, so I didn't hear the version sung by 16-year-old pop star Jasmine Villegas.)
All I can say after is -- what in heaven's name was NYRA thinking?
It isn't that "Empire State of Mind" is a bad song. It's actually a pretty good one; I'm not a big listener of hip-hop, but upon hearing it, I realized that I had heard it a few times before and generally enjoyed the tune.
Trouble is, it's a horrible choice of song as introductory music for the Belmont Stakes.
My first criticism is that the song has to be considerably cleaned up for television. The original version is laced with profanity -- and, seemingly to the detriment of NYRA, Belmont Park, the race and the city -- uncomplimentary imagery of New York. I'm sure that Jay-Z loves his home city, but the song includes references to "corners where we sell rock" and "good girls gone bad." The lyrics warn that "Jesus can't save you." And my favorite among lines that almost certainly must be redacted: "Mommy took a bus trip, now she got her bust out; everybody ride her just like a bus route."
NYRA's marketing director, Neema Ghazi, has called the piece a "quintessential 21st-century theme song for New York City."
But, Mr. Ghazi, is this really the song that you want millions of people scrambling to look up and listen to online after they've heard only the sanitized version during the race broadcast?
How did hitching the Belmont Stakes' wagon to a song that mentions crack cocaine ever seem like a good idea?
Yeah, some people out there loved it. But some people out there don't have any sense. And some people out there work for NYRA. ... And clearly those three circles overlapped on the Venn diagram of life, with this lamentable result.
Besides, even if the new song were completely clean, "New York, New York" is (and maybe always will be) more widely recognized around the world than "Empire State of Mind," which was only released in October of last year. And while "Empire State of Mind" did hit No. 1, it's unrealistic to consider it a "classic" song befitting an American classic race; the darned thing has only been on the market for eight months.
Since I missed the race, I didn't see how ABC handled the song. But friends have commented that the network cut to commercial during Villegas' rendition. Was it that bad, or just too long? ... More pertinent, have you ever seen a network cut away from "My Old Kentucky Home" on Derby Day? And if ABC didn't see fit to air in its entirety the supposedly "quintessential" song chosen as Belmont Park's marquee race's anthem, is anyone in the halls of NYRA having second thoughts?
If NYRA wanted to replace "New York, New York" -- which it's still highly debatable that it should have -- a much better choice would have been a different native New Yorker's tune, one with considerably more history than the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys latecomer (which has an eerily similar title), with lyrics that don't need sanitized, and written by a man with an equally undeniable love of the city ... Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind."
