Soundtrack to Impact, Vol. 3: Empire State of Mind
The Song
Artist(s): Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys
Release date: September 1, 2009 (third single from The Blueprint 3)
The Story
Full disclosure before we go any further: Jay-Z is my favorite artist, New York is my favorite city, and this song sits at the exact intersection of both, so I am contractually incapable of being neutral about it. Let's proceed anyway.
While some songs are written from a third-person POV, some are simply written by the people whose lives they describe. "Empire State of Mind" fits this perfectly. It was written by two New Yorkers, Angela Hunte and Janet "Jnay" Sewell-Ulepic, while they were living in London and aching for home. Homesickness, it turns out, produces better anthems than assignment briefs ever do. Hunte and Sewell-Ulepic weren't trying to write a hit, but were trying to survive missing a city that was core to their identity. As fate would have it, this just happened to also become one of the biggest songs of the decade. New York has a way of doing that to people.
Here's the detail that still makes me grin every time I hear it: Hunte grew up in the same Brooklyn building as Jay-Z. Two kids from the same stairwell, and one of them ends up writing the song that becomes the other's biggest single. If you tried to pitch that as fiction, an editor would tell you to make it more believable.
The track was submitted to Roc Nation and initially passed on, which is either the funniest or most humbling footnote in the whole story, depending on your mood. It took EMI's Jon "Big Jon" Platt to rescue it from the reject pile and get it back in front of Jay-Z, who heard what everyone else apparently missed: this wasn't just a good song, but a civic anthem waiting for its narrator.
And Jay-Z was, obviously, the right narrator. Born Shawn Carter and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, he builds his verses like a walking tour of his own coming-up — naming the neighborhood, naming the block, sitting himself "right next to De Niro" while insisting he'll "be hood forever." That's the whole man in one bar, honestly. He nods to Sinatra's "New York, New York" with the line about making it there and making it anywhere, which is either a flex or a thesis statement, depending on how generous you're feeling. Alicia Keys, raised in Hell's Kitchen, takes the hook and turns it into something closer to scripture — the city as the place "where dreams are made of," where there's "nothin' you can't do." Producer Al Shux built the whole thing on a sampled loop of "Love on a Two-Way Street," a 1970 Sylvia Robinson and Burt Keyes song performed by The Moments, giving the track a warmth underneath all that swagger.
The title itself is a lineage that borrows its shape from three generations of New York artists. Decades apart, Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind" and Nas's "N.Y. State of Mind" echo the same phrase, because apparently no other city on Earth requires its own dedicated state of mind. New York just does that to songwriters.
The Impact
"Empire State of Mind" became Jay-Z's first-ever lead single to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it didn't just show up — it moved in and stayed five weeks, like it had a lease. Three Grammy nominations, two wins. First week sales of 250,000, which by 2012 had climbed past five million. As of mid-2024, it's RIAA-certified Diamond with more than ten million copies sold stateside, and it cracked the top ten in nine other countries — meaning people in Denmark, of all places, decided they too needed a New York state of mind.
But the numbers are almost the least interesting part. This song became the sound New York reaches for when it wants to announce itself — at ballgames, at parades, at the exact moments the city is feeling itself the hardest. It is, culturally, the closest thing New York has to a fight song.
Which brings me to the summer the city is currently having, because apparently the city read and definitely understood the assignment. The Knicks won the NBA championship this June — their first title since 1973, ending a title drought older than most of the people reading this — with Jalen Brunson turning in a Finals MVP run that felt scripted. Meanwhile, City Hall has had its own headline-making stretch, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani moving fast on the promises he actually campaigned on, which, if you know anything about how campaign promises usually go, is its own small miracle. Between the parade and the policy wins, "there's nothin' you can't do" has stopped sounding like a lyric and started sounding like the city's current mood board. (Sidenote: Am I extremely jealous of everyone living in or traveling to NYC this summer? Yes - [insert some “sentence enhancers”] yes.)
The Connection to Identity
Every city has a sound. Very few manage to hold two completely different identities in the same four minutes: the hood and the high-rise, the block and the boardroom, the kid from Bed-Stuy standing next to De Niro without ever pretending he isn't still the kid from Bed-Stuy. That's the trick of this song, and it's exactly why it earns its spot in a month about identity.
Jay-Z never resolves that tension and he honestly doesn't even try. He just holds both halves of himself at once, verse after verse, because that's what an honest identity actually sounds like. It’s not a cleaned-up, upgraded version of yourself with the block edited out, but the whole self, contradictions and all, carried forward on purpose. Keys' hook does the same work for the city itself: New York's identity was never about being one thing. It's about being everything, all at once, and daring you to keep up. It's exhausting, but also, in my extremely biased opinion, the whole point.
That's the real reason this song hasn't aged a single day since 2009. It's not nostalgia — nostalgia is for songs that miss what used to be true. This one's still true. It's a blueprint the city keeps re-running on schedule, and this summer it ran it again: a championship banner going up, a mayor moving at the pace he promised, and a whole city loudly reminding everyone within earshot that it's still exactly what it's always claimed to be. There's nothin' you can't do. New York's just been showing its receipts lately.