Credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Alamy

Mon 23 February 2026 2:30, UK

There are hundreds of noteworthy pop songs that were written either directly about or inspired by the city of Los Angeles.

A weirdly high percentage of them, however, seem to hone in on the city’s seedy underbelly (‘LA Woman’, ‘Under the Bridge’, ‘Straight Outta Compton’, ‘Hotel California’) rather than singing its praises. Where was LA’s equivalent to Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’?

Then, in a slow, gradual manner over the course of two decades, it happened: LA decided that it had a worthy anthem; a prideful theme song that would be adopted as post-game victory celebration music by both the city’s beloved NBA team, the Lakers, and its historic baseball team, the Dodgers. This was, of course, ‘I Love LA’, a feel-good classic from the unlikeliest of feel-good anthem writers, Randy Newman.

When Newman released ‘I Love LA’ as a single in 1983, from his album Trouble in Paradise, it barely registered on the radar in Los Angeles, let alone nationally. The following year, however, when LA hosted the 1984 Summer Olympics (as the city will be doing once again in 2028), an aggressive commercial campaign by the upstart Nike shoe company used Newman’s song throughout the games, introducing it to a much wider audience. Four years later, the song was again featured prominently in a lengthy sequence in the hit comedy movie The Naked Gun.

As a result, despite never actually registering on the charts as a legitimate hit, ‘I Love LA’ had nestled itself into pop culture, with most Angelenos happily willing to join in on its cheery call-and-response chorus, in which Newman’s shout of “I love LA” is answered with a “We love it!” from Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie and Lindsay Buckingham.

It probably helps that Randy Newman is best known to the general American populace as the funny-sounding fella who sings the theme from Toy Story, raising few concerns that his ode to Los Angeles might be something, perhaps, more complex and nuanced than it seemed.

More astute Newman appreciators, however, being well aware of his position as one of the finest wits and wordsmiths in modern pop history, immediately recognised a satirical undercurrent to the song; some sarcastic jabs and criticisms that certainly don’t exist in ‘New York, New York’ or ‘Sweet Home Chicago’.

“Look at that mountain, look at those trees,” Newman sings in the third verse. “Look at that bum over there, man, he’s down on his knees.”

As Newman later explained to Rolling Stone in 2017, “I wrote ‘I Love L.A.’ because Don Henley said to me, ‘Everybody’s writing LA songs; people not from here. You’re from here. Why don’t you write one?’ . . . There is an aggressive ignorance to the song – ignorant and proud of it. There’s nothing wrong with the Beach Boys and open-top cars. But the guy talks about the bum [on his knees] and is still shouting ‘We love it!’”

Even the LA street names that Newman calls out toward the end of the song – Century Boulevard, Victory Boulevard, etc – were likely selected, according to one LA Weekly report, because of their bad reputations for crime, drugs, and collapsing infrastructure in the early ‘80s.

It’s not so simple to say that the rapscallion Mr Newman has been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes for 40 years, however. Yes, there is some comedic smack talk lurking in those lyrics as they’re blaring out of the PA system at Dodger Stadium. But Newman isn’t an outsider mocking LA’s vapidness. He is a longtime Los Angeles resident who genuinely loves the city, for all its flaws and “aggressive ignorance,” as he put it. New York, by comparison, is “cold and damp,” as he sings in the song’s opening lines, and Chicago is “too rugged,” but “everybody’s very happy” in Los Angeles. “Cause the sun is shining all the time / Looks like another perfect day.”