It’s apparently time for a major change in the paper-thin story.Īnd it turns out that Alicia Keys is the plot twist. (I scribble in my notes: Perhaps the “Empire State of Mind” might have something to do with narcissism? Further research imperative.) Then the music gets a little more dramatic, and we are suddenly presented with aerial shots as we zoom over the city. Jay-Z, now standing somewhere else that I don’t recognize, starts rapping shout-outs to the subway, Biggie Smalls, some guy from Texas, basketball, and the apparent fact that Jay-Z is the most famous person in the world. I’m clearly not qualified to make a valid assessment, based on my birth city. Since he’s supposedly in the middle of NYC and yet there’s not a car in sight, this is obviously a dream sequence. Based on the lyrics, it seems that he’s comparing himself to Frank Sinatra (really?) and making hand gestures that might possibly have deep symbolic meaning, or it might be that he just always wanted to be a traffic cop. Suddenly, Jay-Z is somewhere else, standing on a street corner. I always start singing “It’s Raining Closeted Men” every time I walk past the first gay bar I entered, about a century ago in Tulsa.) (To be fair, architecture can have a profound influence on your musical talents. But this structure must be important to him in some way, because merely being in proximity of this apparent landmark causes him to burst into a rap. (Perhaps the street signage is a subtle hint that if we tourists would just read such things, we might be able to get where we need to be without interrupting the citizenry with inane queries.) The camera finally settles on Jay-Z, as he begins to sing in front of some building that I don’t recognize. The initial part of the video features montage shots of various buildings and street signs while the music begins to percolate. Since I once took a few college courses in psychology, in between the frat parties and the raw nakedness of my desperate need to fit in, I suppose we can approach this video from a scientific viewpoint and hope that we somehow learn what makes New Yorkers so appalled when you ask them for directions. After all, this song is theoretically about how the Big Apple modifies your genetics in a way that simply doesn’t happen in the fly-over states. Still, this isn’t my story, even though I often assume that all songs are about me in some way, so I suppose we should listen to what Jay-Z and Alicia have to share. This may or may not be true (I never reveal what I might have done with a goat), but I’m already prompted to ask this: When I walk outside my house, I can see trees and grass and flowers that I actually own. With domestic sales of four million copies and worldwide sales of eight million copies, The Diary of Alicia Keys is the thirty-first best-selling album of the 2000s decade.This little ditty is a tribute to living in New York City, so it instantly has that aura of “we are automatically cooler than you because we live in a bustling metropolis with 876 billion other people and you probably live on a farm where you have hand-fed a goat”. Upon its release, The Diary of Alicia Keys received generally positive reviews from music critics and earned Keys three Grammy Awards at the 47th Grammy Awards. It became Keys' second consecutive number-one debut in the United States and spawned three top-ten singles. The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 618,000 copies in its first week. The album was recorded at several recording studios, and production was handled primarily by Keys with contributions from Kanye West and Kerry Brothers, Jr., who described it as "an R&B album". It was released in the United States on December 2, 2003, by J Records. The Diary of Alicia Keys is the second studio album by American singer and songwriter Alicia Keys.
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