I love you Alicia Keys: your hip-writhing, stand-up piano-playing and hoop earrings in-spy-yah me just like the bright lights of the city you sing about.
But your catchy and emphatic insistence that ‘
New York: there’s nothing you can’t do’, has worried me ever since I first heard it, because I know for a fact that there's HEAPS of things you can't do in New York. Allow me to set the record straight.
1. You can’t own a toy gun
Toy guns are illegal in New York. Here is some information taken straight from the only place whose very website address makes you feel you should be wearing a suit just to click on it—
lawyers.com:
Toy guns can't be sold in New York City unless they are colored bright green, blue, red or another neon color.
This is because of a sad bunch of facts, which are all too sad and factual to mention here, but which basically illustrate the point that people who carry toy guns tend to get shot dead by police, hence the ban. Horrible. Let's move on.
2. You can't smoke
I don't think there's really any place in the world you can smoke anymore, except of course for the obscure country of a Lady Gaga film clip. In New York, though, smoking restrictions are getting even stricter.
Apparently, landlords are starting to
extend the ban to apartments, which means that the world—already so divided in differences of opinion regarding religion, politics and Lady Gaga—will now be even
more split between those who are smokers and those who are non-smokers.
I don’t want to live in a world like this because I love my cigarette-dependent friends and I hardly ever get to talk to them anymore about things like Lady Gaga videos because they are always leaving to go outside and smoke. It’s madness. A far more intelligent solution would surely be to supply portable oxygen tanks to everyone who doesn’t smoke and thereby STOP this senseless violation of my civil liberties, the ones that say I have the constitutional right to have a nice, uninterrupted conversation with my friends.
3. You can't own nunchakus
It’s illegal to possess nunchakus in New York. This sounds kind of scandalous to me. However, when I tried canvassing a group of friends to find out what they thought about this ‘issue’, I didn't get any response because they all left to go outside and smoke a cigarette.
4. You can't have bake sales
I know what you’re thinking about this ban: you’re thinking the same as
La Guardia student, Eli Salamon-Abrams, 14, who says: 'I think it’s kind of pointless. I mean, why
can’t we have bake sales?'
Well Eli, it's because the government thinks YOU’RE ALL TOO FAT. Sorry. You’ll have to find another way to raise money for your school. How about selling your life on eBay
like that divorced guy?
5. You can't re-paint bike lines
It's
true.
There's a particular 14-block stretch of road along Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg that had its bike lane removed at the request of the local Hasidic community. But then Guerilla Hipsters* (*true actual sub-species of Hipster) painted it back on in the middle of the night in a renegade midnight mission that you can
watch on YouTube.
This is a very controversial topic, because as you can understand, the hipsters need the bike lanes to ride their bikes into the city to see
that New Typography exhibition at MoMA (which looks amazing btw), but the local Hasidic community would prefer it if female riders in skimpy gear
didn’t cycle down their street. (This may be simplifying things a little but that’s generally what I could glean from the article.)
Anyway, it all sounds way too controversial for me because as you know I like to try to stay away from controversial topics on this blog. So I think we’ll just leave it there and move onto gay marriage instead. Because, can you believe it:
6. You still can’t get married if you’re gay
Gay marriage is illegal in New York. That’s why I love that the city accidentally married these two guys last year! Of course, when it was discovered they were both men they got their marriage licence revoked, but it was wonderful while it lasted because for a split second there we all thought we lived in a world where church and state were actually separated for once. And even if it was only the result of the general incompetency of government workers, it felt pretty good.
7. You can't keep bees
Beekeeping is illegal in New York. This is because apparently bees are a threat due to the possibility of swarming. Also, they can kill some people who are allergic to them. But not even THE LAW can stop some crazy Brooklynites who even hold secret beekeeping classes on their rooftops. Dangerous. Didn't they ever see this Wu-Tang Clan video?
8. You can't own a ferret
This is really sad news for anyone who lives in New York and
wants to own a ferret. If that's you, you should probably move to somewhere else in the state of New York where ferrets are not prejudiced against in any way. For the rest of us, I’m not sure we’re really that interested.
9. You can't listen to U2 on the radio
As Voltaire said, I may not agree with what you listen to but I’ll defend to the death your right to listen to it. Actually, this is a total lie; there’s no way I’d die for any band you like because people’s musical tastes are as mutable and changable as the seasons, and I would be very retrospectively pissed-off if I had ever died defending someone’s right to listen to, say, Baz Luhrmann’s ‘
Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’.
Thus, the New York radio disc jockey who
banned U2 is okay by me because it is my personal belief that noone should ever listen to U2,
especially people who live in New York who have so many better things they could be doing with their time instead, such as writhing around at the Yankee Stadium with Jay-Z singing about how much they love New York.
(The full story here is that radio station 101.9 WRXP banned the band because the host of a programme called ‘Anything Anything’ [and yes, I have already written to them suggesting they should change the name of the show to ‘Anything, Anything (Except U2’)], is rebelling against Bono, who is of the opinion that radio stations should pay added fees on top of regular royalties to him whenever they play a U2 song.)
CONCLUSION
Alicia Keys, you know how much I love you, but what you are essentially doing is teaching a generation of children that they can do
anything in New York. And it's quite obvious from the above that if, on the off-chance, they grow up to be bicycling, homosexual apiarists, or obese smokers who love U2, or toy gun/nunchaku-wielding ferret-lovers, they’re really going to be restricted in some of their interests.
So in conclusion, please take more care when writing your lyrics next time. Thank you, and PS—
amazing song, I totally love it!