Featured Image Credit: Graphic House / Staff / via Getty Images
Topics: Music, TV And Film
Ella Scott
Almost fifty years later and people are still theorising why the legendary Frank Sinatra sang a famous song line twice.
In 1977, film director Martin Scorsese released New York, New York, starring Robert De Niro, Liza Minnelli, and the late Lionel Stander.
The romantic musical, which received four Golden Globes and two BAFTA nominations, had a revival in 2023 with a short-lived Broadway musical, and is listed on AFI’s Greatest Movie Musicals list.
The title song was composed by John Kander, with lyrics by Fred Ebb, and originally sung by Academy Award winner Liza Minnelli.
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Two years after its release, New Jersey native Sinatra, who died in May 1998, covered it and the rest, as they say, is history.
It became the legendary singer’s final Top 40 hit in the United States and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance.
While ‘New York, New York’ is by no means Sinatra’s song, it has become synonymous with the star and the city, with it being played at the end of all four Super Bowls that the New York Giants have won to date.
It’s also been used before kickoff of Super Bowl XLVIII, to induct Sinatra into the Grammy Hall of Fame back in 2013, and to celebrate the New York Liberty’s 2024 WNBA victory.
But despite its fame, and the fact that the version was released 45 years ago, some people are only just realising why the noun ‘New York, New York’ may have been repeated.
“It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that in ‘New York, New York’, Frank Sinatra is referring to the city and state respectively and not just repeating himself for emphasis,” one X user typed.
A second echoed that the karaoke staple, which debuted at Radio City Music Hall, was just saying ‘New York City’ followed by ‘New York State’.
“I’ve never really known if he's saying it like ‘New York State, New York’ or just repeating NY the city for emphasis,” replied a Reddit user.
“I always assumed city twice for some reason but also never really considered it,” someone else commented.
Over on Facebook, someone else reasoned: “He sings it twice because that's the way the song was written and the way it needs to be sung so that it scans or fits with the melody. Countless songs do the same thing all the time for the same reason and it's rare that a repetition is there to give any additional meaning to the lyric.”
“The beauty is in the ambiguity,” argued another social media user.
In the past, Kander has said that ‘New York, New York’ was whipped up in just 45 minutes.
“It has a lot of anger in it because we were really p****d off — it was like, 'Some actor is going to tell us how to write a song?',” he told E!, referring to an alleged confrontation with De Niro.
It’s understood that the actor, who played egotistical saxophonist Jimmy Doyle in the original film, didn’t feel like the original version of the track was ‘attached to his character’.
"The fact is De Niro was absolutely right," Kander told the publication in 2022 of the revamped number, which went on to become the iconic track we know and love.
"It's a much better song.”
Alexa, play ‘New York, New York’ will you, please?