Let Taylor Swift Teach You How to Be a New Yorker

New York City is the greatest city in the world. This is a piece of wisdom that you will find repeated by people who have lived in New York their whole lives as well as by people who have never been to New York. New York is an idea. It is ever-changing. It is constantly worsening, according to most people who live in it and do not possess ungodly amounts of money. Objectively, New York is only getting better. Property values just keep going up, and people just keep wanting to move here. Last year, New York City saw an all-time high in visitors from around the world. It is truly the City That Never Sleeps, a place full of eight million stories that is where dreams are made of.

It is also now the home of Taylor Swift, one of the biggest pop stars in the world and a true New York aficionado.

Like many people who are new to the city, Taylor Swift has not always found herself greeted with open arms. Her song "Welcome to New York" has been called "an anthem not for the city, not for its transplants, but for its transient oligarch class"; "the gentrification anthem NYC didn't need"; and "the worst NYC anthem of all time."

Breaking news: @taylorswift13 is our Global Welcome Ambassador! #WelcomeToNewYork! http://t.co/6p0bGZQoey #w2ny pic.twitter.com/cwfPb9TAT5

— nycgo (@nycgo) October 27, 2014

Well, joke is on you, self-appointed arbiters of what is the Real New York and Not the Real New York, because Taylor Swift is now the city's Global Welcome Ambassador, and this song is going to be burned into the world's consciousness as surely as Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" and far more so than any Velvet Underground song ever was. What does being a Global Welcome Ambassador mean? Well, NYC & Company, the city's "official marketing, tourism and partnership organization," has licensed Taylor Swift's song and brought her on to make a series of promotional videos for New York, in which Taylor Swift explains why she loves walking around New York, that she thinks the best lattes are in New York, and what a bodega is ("Bodegas are our friends," she says, as someone who has almost certainly never felt the warm embrace of a bodega sandwich ordered while drunkenly holding herself upright on a deli case at 3 AM). She has a lengthy diatribe about how to pronounce "Houston Street," which is indeed something that tourists watching these videos in the back of a cab will find useful. She also explains what a "stoop" is, which is something that I imagine a large portion of the country could explain with as much authority as Taylor Swift.

Does this mean New York City is over? New York City is always over, and many of its biggest boosters have always been the people who lead the shiniest, most privileged version of life in it. And you know what? Taylor Swift's idea of New York may be totally different from what most of us are up to—although I could go for an afternoon walking around and visiting coffee shops in the West Village—but most people who visit New York are interested in that side of it anyway. Times Square may suck, but it's what people who have never been to New York want to see. They want to go to the top of the Empire State Building and look at the Statue of Liberty and see Broadway plays. They can't wait to ride a fucking Citibike. And while there are literally thousands of other famous New Yorkers who could be the city's spokesperson, most of them wouldn't also be essentially glorified tourists themselves, willing to take other, less knowledgeable tourists under their wings. Most New Yorkers would be too busy complaining about the tourists who don't understand the Real New York and who could really stand to get out of their way and stop acting like the subway is some foreign, unworkable contraption to explain the city in friendly, upbeat, entirely unrealistic terms.

"Everywhere you look, it's impossible not to fall in love or be affected by something in New York City," Taylor Swift says, which is definitely at least half true. New York will affect you in all kinds of ways. Sometimes you'll find yourself waiting on a train platform at 4 AM for a train that never comes, wondering how the hell you are going to get home because you literally don't have enough money to your name to afford a cab. Sometimes you'll never get mail delivered because your buzzer doesn't work and your landlord won't answer your calls to fix it. Sometimes you will then go to the post office and have to wait in line for an hour to retrieve your mail only to find out it has already been returned to the sender. New York is truly a city of mystery and wonder.

But Taylor Swift will make you feel as though New York is not some impenetrable hellhole where everything is more expensive and more time-consuming and less pleasant than it would be almost anywhere else in the country (which it often can be, if you are not as wealthy as, say, Taylor Swift). She might as well be a Global Ambassador. So welcome to New York, motherfuckers. Now go find out what a stoop is from Taylor Swift.