The city’s anthem is unmistakably tongue-in-cheek.
By Soumya Karlamangla
Published Nov. 19, 2021Updated Nov. 26, 2021
Republished with permission of The New York Times
Los Angeles hasn’t typically been a place that inspires bold declarations of love.
So many commonly held beliefs about Los Angeles are actually slights: too car-centric, pricey, vapid, unsafe, polluted. Even our city’s anthem, Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” is unmistakably tongue-in-cheek.
But for many Angelenos, myself included, the open secret about living here is that it’s pretty incredible. The vastness and heterogeneity of Los Angeles often make it feel like a land of endless wonders, difficult to translate for people who come for only a few days.
“Visiting Los Angeles and living in Los Angeles are very different experiences. I don’t really recommend the former but I find the latter enriching,” Rosecrans Baldwin, a writer in Los Angeles, told me. “There’s a lot of room in Los Angeles, especially for people who might not fit somewhere else, and I think that gives the city a tremendous amount of life.”
Baldwin interviewed dozens of Angelenos for his recent book, “Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles.” And true to form, many seemed hesitant to proclaim their love for the city.
Baldwin chalked it up to tired comparisons of Los Angeles and New York that have long framed our city as an underdog. Even the popular “S.N.L.” sketch “The Californians” portrays us as little more than drawling, driving idiots.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2013, I too wasn’t expecting much. I had been living in the Bay Area, where a feeling of intellectual and cultural superiority to Los Angeles ran rampant.
But within a year or so, the city had won me over. I could hike to Griffith Observatory any day of the year, find every food I dreamed of (and more) and see my family as often as I chose. Nowadays, nothing compares to watching from a window seat of a plane as we descend into this twinkling metropolis and knowing I’m almost home.
Baldwin moved to Los Angeles six years ago and quickly fell for the region’s unruliness, he said. While other cities can feel as if you’re walking around a tidy outdoor shopping mall, Los Angeles surprises him daily.
He also has a connection to the city: his first name, shared by the famous street mentioned in 2Pac’s “California Love.” Both Baldwin and the street are named after William Rosecrans, a congressman from the late 1800s who’s an ancestor of Baldwin’s.
Baldwin told me he was hopeful that unabashedly loving Los Angeles was becoming less taboo. Most people he interviewed revealed they were happy here.
“Even people who were in the most struggling of circumstances that I talked to, they had their Los Angeles,” Baldwin said. “There was some sense of like, the ground has shifted a little bit, that perhaps it’s not as cliché as it might’ve been to be up front, ‘Yeah, I love L.A.,’ and cue the Randy Newman song.”
The original “Hollywood” sign in 1924.Credit…Underwood Archives/Getty Images
Cue it indeed: I’ve long wondered whether the songwriter behind the wry “I Love L.A.,” the unofficial theme song of the 1984 Summer Olympics, actually loves Los Angeles.
You may remember that the song’s narrator drives in a convertible, takes in the city’s sights — “Look at that bum over there” — and listens to the Beach Boys, all beside “a big nasty redhead” in the passenger seat.
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When I called Newman on a recent morning (he was in his home in the Pacific Palisades), he told me that while his song might not be “a Chamber of Commerce tune,” that didn’t mean the Angeleno in his lyrics enjoyed his life any less.
“There’s sort of an aggressive ignorance to it that I like. You know, he likes the redhead. I do too — and the Beach Boys and riding in an open car,” he said. “Maybe people in L.A. have to apologize for those kinds of basic joys in life, but I don’t know why.”
Plus, Newman noted, no matter the original intention, when “I Love L.A.” is played now, like at Dodger Stadium after the home team wins, “people are unabashedly happy.”
So, I asked Newman, “Do you love L.A.?” He took a long pause.
“I think I’ve come to,” he said. “Maybe the song had something to do with it. It’s home.”
