Steve the Pocket wrote:Oh, and: Who else here actually knows more of "We Built This City" than the chorus? There's a bit in there with a fake radio announcer who says he's coming from "the city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps!" just to further muddy the question of what city the song is referring to. (For the uninitiated, San Francisco, Cleveland, and New York, respectively. Probably the three most likely candidates to begin with because Starship is from San Francisco, Cleveland is said to be the birthplace of rock and roll, and New York just thinks it deserves every title worth handing out.) But I initially parsed it as "the city that rocks the city that never sleeps", which struck me as a creative and colorful way to refer to... I dunno, some city close to New York. You know, like... "New York is the city that never sleeps—because we keep them up at night!"
I remember arriving in NYC on a Greyhound from (I think) Bangor, ME at like 4am. Place looked pretty damned sleepy to me.
Come to think of it, never sleeping could probably serve as a workable definition of what a city
is. I realise, though, that I'm using
city as normally understood in the UK. I have the impression that the bar for citydom in the US is much lower. (There's a factoid about UK cities having to have a university or cathedral, but I'm pretty sure that appeared as a "klaxon question" on QI).