NYC Lyrics in English Gaël Faye

Gaël Faye’s “NYC” is a love-hate postcard written in rapid-fire verses. He steps into New York as a wide-eyed outsider, craning his neck at endless skyscrapers while scribbling rhymes in a battered spiral notebook. The city glitters like “billions of galaxies,” yet its steam vents, sirens, and relentless pace eat away at his ego. Hip-hop ghosts hover in the air—Wu-Tang, Queensbridge—reminding him why he made the pilgrimage in the first place. Still, every neon thrill is shadowed by gunfire flashes, police batons, and homeless carts. One minute he’s marveling at Little Italy, the next he’s daydreaming of Madagascan beaches where the water, not concrete, stretches to the horizon.

The song captures New York as a dizzying contradiction: a vertical playground for ambition and a labyrinth of human struggle. Faye filters this duality through his own history of chaos and teenage rage, turning the taxi ride into a moving cinema reel of contrasts—comfort versus autopsy-room cold, cosmopolitan shine versus street-level despair. In the end, “NYC” isn’t just about a city; it’s about the tug-of-war between escape and attraction, between the poet’s restless past and the magnetic promise of new stories waiting at every steaming manhole cover.