NEW YORK CITY
New York, often called New York City to distinguish it from New York State, or NYC for short, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the State of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities. New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, significantly influencing commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, dining, art, fashion, and sports, and is the most photographed city in the world.Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy, and has sometimes been called the capital of the world.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City is composed of five boroughs, each of which is coextensive with a respective county of the State of New York. The five boroughs—Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens (Queens County), Manhattan (New York County), the Bronx (Bronx County), and Staten Island (Richmond County)—were created when local governments were consolidated into a single municipal entity in 1898. The city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world as of 2016. As of 2018, the New York metropolitan area is estimated to produce a gross metropolitan product (GMP) of nearly $1.8 trillion, ranking it first in the United States. If the New York metropolitan area were a sovereign state, it would have the eighth-largest economy in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world.
New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded on the southern tip of Manhattan Island by Dutch colonists in approximately 1624. The settlement was named New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw Amsterdam) in 1626 and was chartered as a city in 1653. The city came under English control in 1664 and was renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. The city was regained by the Dutch in July 1673 and was renamed New Orange for one year and three months; the city has been continuously named New York since November 1674. New York City was the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, and has been the largest U.S. city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U.S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a symbol of the U.S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity, entrepreneurship, and environmental sustainability, and as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. In 2019, New York was voted the greatest city in the world per a survey of over 30,000 people from 48 cities worldwide, citing its cultural diversity.
Many districts and monuments in New York City are major landmarks, including three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013. A record 66.6 million tourists visited New York City in 2019. Times Square is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, and a major center of the world's entertainment industry. Many of the city's landmarks, skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world, as is the city's fast pace, spawning the term New York minute. The Empire State Building has become the global standard of reference to describe the height and length of other structures. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. Providing continuous 24/7 service and contributing to the nickname The City That Never Sleeps, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. The city has over 120 colleges and universities, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, and the City University of New York system, which is the largest urban public university system in the United States. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the world's leading financial center and the most financially powerful city in the world, and is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
AFRICAN AMERICANS
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and formerly, Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The term African American generally denotes descendants of enslaved Africans who are from the United States. While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American, the vast majority do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin.
African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the US, after White Americans, and the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West/Central African with some European descent, and some also have Native American and other ancestry.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities (~95%). Immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American, and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term.
African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans from West Africa being sold to European slave traders and transported across the Atlantic to the Thirteen Colonies. After arriving in the Americas, they were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom through manumission or escape and founded independent communities before and during the American Revolution.
After the United States was founded in 1783, most Black people continued to be enslaved, being most concentrated in the American South, with four million enslaved only liberated during and at the end of the Civil War in 1865. During Reconstruction, they gained citizenship and the right to vote, but due to White supremacy, they were largely treated as second-class citizens and found themselves soon disenfranchised in the South. These circumstances changed due to participation in the military conflicts of the United States, substantial migration out of the South, the elimination of legal racial segregation, and the civil rights movement which sought political and social freedom. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SONG
The literary genre that is selected to examine African Americans’ social, historical, and cultural status in the United States is a song, named “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys. It is composed of eight stanzas which are sung in succession by the two singers, and it belongs to the musical genre of hip-hop, also known as rap. The compressed title, which alludes to earlier written New York songs, implies that living in the shadow of the Empire State Building leads to a particular state of mind while the variety of rhyming and rhythmical patterns that interweave with the successive verses are identifiable traits of its lyrics. This lyricism facilitates the manifestation and the externalization of the African American element which is critical for the thorough interpretation of the song due to its multilayered structure.
HIP-HOP CULTURE AND RESISTANCE
Initially, the hip-hop or rap music emerged in the mid-1970s in the Bronx of New York, and it rapidly gained popularity (Sullivan) due to the gradually escalating urgency for the deployment of urban locality discourses (Forman); in the 1980s, it had dramatically expanded worldwide, reaching to the late-1980s to early 1990s that was characterized as the golden era of rap. Despite rappers’ initial overt references to political and sociocultural themes and address to gang violence, police brutality, poverty, and racism, after the millennium the focus was shifted on money and sexual exploitation, instead (Sullivan). Nowadays, the emphasis is located mainly on the place and the advertisement of rappers’ businesses, friends, family members or neighbors; in the process of going local, rap has become regional. The ‘postindustrial city’ constitutes the creative environment and the foundation for the cultural production of the rap music; the emphasis on territoriality is rather noticeable and audible in hip-hop songs. Additionally, it is notorious for its great capacity to highlight the constraints and the social conditions of young African American and Latino youths presenting a set of contexts for the analysis of spatial partitioning of race and their diverse experiences (Forman). The institutional racism, oppression, and discrimination of the subordinated group of African Americans forced them to discover ways to resist the systematic injustice and cultural hegemony by the dominant group; thus, rap is a form of oppositional culture to the exploitation and marginalization of the system (Martinez).
MAIN THEMES
The main themes of realism and idealization that prevail the song are contradicted throughout the whole song since the New York’s real and gritty side of hustling comes in conjunction with its idealized and flashy aspect and the soaring beauty of the chorus; the references to social threats such as sexual exploitation, drug abuse, immorality, violence, and criminality are opposed to Jay-Z’s and Alicia Keys’ view of New York as a glittering metropolis where the great opportunities provided enhance the realization of dreams and debunk the impossibility of things. Moreover, it could be indeed regarded as an incoherently unfolded story due to the “erratic enumeration of often unconnected and frequently highly cryptic allusions and associations” (Freese 191).
ANALYSIS OF THE STANZAS
Particularly, the first and third stanza refer to Jay-Z’s personal praise due to his imperiality (“since I made it here / I can make it anywhere”) and his richness as a New York rapper (“Sitting courtside”), whereas in the second stanza Alicia Keys provides traditional images of the Big Apple and presents New York as a city of opportunity echoing Frank Sinatra’s song and extensively reminding the ‘New World’ of America where the America’s ‘big dream’ can be accomplished on the ‘city set upon a hill’. By characterizing New York as a “concrete jungle”, notions of Social Darwinism are portrayed (‘survival of the fittest’). In the fifth stanza, Jay-Z abruptly and illogically transits to the fate of hapless girls who come in the city with hopes of gaining fame and they end up as prostitutes and drug-addicts. Contrastingly, Alicia Keys’ ending is rather a surprise since it seems she totally ignores the preceding lyrics and focuses on the city’s beauty (“looking pretty”) (Freese).
CONCLUSION
The ending of the song evocates a life which is stretched between success and failure, between living in the stardom or in the margins. However, the commercialized hip-hop of our era does not longer express so intensely the anger and frustration experienced by black youths on the margin of society as the last decades; the “commodification has domesticated black rap into just another segment of the music industry that caters to the expectations of an apolitical audience simply wanting to be entertained” (Freese 196); “Empire State of Mind” could be regarded as an intriguing example of this mindset including, of course, instances of African American culture and identity.
WORKS CITED
Forman, Murray. “‘Represent’: Race, Space and Place in Rap Music.” Popular Music, vol. 19, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 65–90, http://www.jstor.org/stable/853712.
Freese, Peter. “Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, ‘Empire State of Mind’ A New Anthem to New York City?” Lied Und Populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture, vol. 56, Zentrum für Populäre Kultur und Musik, 2011, pp. 169–96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23339035.
Jay-Z, and Alicia Keys. "Empire State of Mind". Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3XlyT4Ums8
Martinez, Theresa A. “Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap as Resistance.” Sociological Perspectives, vol. 40, no. 2, Sage Publications, Inc., 1997, pp. 265–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/1389525.
Sullivan, Rachel E. “Rap and Race: It’s Got a Nice Beat, but What about the Message?” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 33, no. 5, Sage Publications, Inc., 2003, pp. 605–22, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180978.