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Sydney To Me sums up the city perfectly: a soulless marketing exercise

Tourism Victoria couldn't have written a better anti-Sydney campaign jingle than this hollow piece of dreck.

Andrew P Street

Sydney has long acted as muse for many of our greatest songwriters. 

Think of Paul Kelly's punning riff on Darlinghurst streetwalkers in Darling It Hurts, or James Reyne eye-rhyming "where the pontoons bump and sway" and "as the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay" in Australian Crawl's classic Reckless, or Cold Chisel's morning-after-the-night-before Kings Cross tribute Breakfast at Sweethearts.

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Local musicians Jess & Matt's new single Sydney to Me showcases their hometown to holidaymakers.

Or Kev Carmody's dark, harrowing tale of state-sanctioned murder in River of Tears. Or most of the Whitlams' catalogue. Or damn near everything Perry Keyes has ever written. 

My own Sydney-specific favourites include Dave McCormack's jubilant post-Custard debut solo single The Inner West (Has Got The Beautiful Girls), the Lucksmiths' plaintively beautiful Guess How Much I Love You (sung from "a backyard in Balmain"), John Kennedy's timeless tale of immigrant romance Miracle In Marrickville, You Am I's "scratch only you could itch" from beneath the then-unfinished Glebe Point Bridge (which had been inconveniently renamed the Anzac Bridge by the time the song was actually released) in Purple Sneakers, Robert Forster's nostalgic ramble through his youthful adventures in the Go Betweens' Darlinghurst Nights, and US singer-songwriter Joe Pernice's sweetly romantic Cronulla Breakdown.

There's no shortage of great songs about Sydney, in other words. Hell, pretty much all of the Lemonheads' It's A Shame About Ray album (much of it co-written with local boy Tom Morgan of Smudge) is about Evan Dando escaping from the US to early '90s Newtown. That helped make the city downright mythical to me when I was a callow youth living in Adelaide and dreaming what life might be like a thousand-odd kilometres north-east.

All of this brings us to the brand new Sydney To Me, by X Factor breakout stars Jess and Matt.

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It was launched at the Opera House's Australia Day celebrations, and since it was commissioned by Destination NSW as their new campaign tune, you can correctly surmise from the outset that this was never going to be a new Power and the Passion for 2017.

Unlike the Oils' classic, it's likely to encourage Sydneysiders to see their hometown in a fresh new light, and encourage them to really start thinking seriously about making that long-mooted move to Melbourne.

The premise of the jingle – sorry, deeply sincere song that truly captures the feelings of these attractive young musical-and-romantic-partners about their hometown – is that J&M; "never knew that love could be / like Sydney to me". 

This, in the politest possible terms, is not a simile that stands up to much scrutiny. That is, unless they're implying that said relationship is cripplingly expensive, difficult to get around in and controlled by a cabal of property developers.

There's also a bit about dancing to music all night in The Domain which presumably harkens back to a simpler time pre-dating the lockouts. In the video this is accompanied by footage of Sydney Festival – which is now about the only music event held there since Homebake, Sydney's unique all-Australian celebration of Australian music, died an inglorious death in 2012. 

Then again, maybe Matt and Jess are being slyly subversive. After all, the subsequent line about "holdin' onto you, nothing we can do" does neatly sum up one's options in the CBD after midnight.

But the lyrics are only part of the story. While the duo came to popular attention thanks to their close harmonies and folksy acoustic material, the soulless production and arrangement of Sydney To Me sounds like exactly the sort of song that would emerge once all the messy little inner city artist enclaves have been priced into oblivion.

A song that sounds like it was looped on a laptop in someone's bedroom is entirely on-message – after all, you can't exactly have spirited garage rock when no Sydney musician could realistically afford a place with a garage. 

In short, Sydney To Me beautifully reflects up the soul of the city right now: vapid, unengaging, and forged entirely by the forces of naked commerce. It's not a song anyone could love, but it's unambiguously the song that we deserve.

PS: To be fair, no song about Sydney can come close to Sandy McMenamin's immortal ode to the Paris of the South, Adelaide You're A Lady. It might be hilariously inept, but you can't accuse it of being insincere.

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