“And you say Chi city!”

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[4.93]

Andy Hutchins: Here we have the rent control “Homecoming”… which somehow spends a lot more time in Chicago’s ‘burbs than the hood. You could be forgiven for not knowing it’s about Chicago if you don’t know Stump and Fiasco are both from there: the color of the Windy City is washed out in favor of too-big shimmering synths and a hook that goes for anthemic and ends up bland. Lupe’s verse, one with more bite and verve than anything on LASERS, is good enough for me to wish this were Fiasco ft. Stump. Enormous missed opportunity in the bridge: should have had a Mrs. O’Leary’s cow reference.
[4]

Michelle Myers: I live in Chicago and I too think it’s the greatest city ever. So the chorus here — both Lupe’s “what if I told you my city was the best?” and Patrick’s “this city is my city and I love it” — makes my heart swell with municipal pride. But, the verses are disappointingly general, largely focused on the broad faults most major cities in the US have (drugs, gangs, corruption). The only reason I know this is about Chicago is because I know that the guys performing the song are from Chicago. If you’re going to write an homage to your hometown, make sure it doesn’t sound like it could be about anywhere.
[6]

Brad Shoup: For all the R&B mannerisms in his arsenal, Stump still strains for his feelings. One of the hallmarks of blue-eyed soul is its effortlessness, and the man reeks of effort. As for “This City,” it fritters away the chance to land a chart single that big-ups an actual location. Both artists are from the Chicago area, which makes the generalism so galling. Lupe injects a bit of reality, if not geography, but cops out at the close. This is the sort of tune ESPN slurps up for tournament coverage, so I hope you like key changes and new-sincerity backing vocals.
[4]

Sally O’Rourke: I guess “This City” is supposed to be about Chicago, given the presence of two of its native sons, but the overt non-specificity is cleverly engineered for maximum pandering; one imagines Stump plugging in “hello Cleveland”-type shoutouts during the summer tour. Lupe doesn’t exactly exert himself on his verse, but at least he seems to be rambling toward vague social commentary. Naturally, he’s kicked off posthaste to make way for more synthy bombast and nebulous blandery.
[3]

Zach Lyon: I am a huge fan of Patrick Stump’s attempt at an R&B career makeover — that his voice is so well-suited for it is one of the major factors to Fall Out Boy’s better tracks. And I’m a fan of nearly everything else he’s released solo, especially “Oh Nostalgia,” one of the top two or three It Gets Better tracks. But this. Oh no. If I were loyal to Chicago I’d take this as a slap in the face. Two Chicagoans going on about their love of someone else’s city. Well, no one else’s city, really, as this isn’t about an actual city, it’s just a tacky ploy at gathering the good will of anyone who happens to be loyal to a city, or wishing they were loyal to a city. Just as hacky as any song that lists off a bunch of cities in its third verse and prays that every one of those cities will take it as their own (especially when they play it in Ottawa, throw “Ottawa” into the list and then bask in the audience’s love), and similar to “We Built This City” (but only half as good), which it eventually starts to sound like if you’re weird about city songs. It’s shameful. On the performance side, it doesn’t get better: Lupe gives so little to his verse, which is literally a rambling paragraph with no poetry, flourish, effort, or attention paid to the rest of the song. Stump gives just as little. If I were either of them, I’d be disappointed in the other.
[2]

Jake Cleland: The great quality of Patrick Stump’s vocals is his ability to make anything sound huge, but the instrumentation here feels like it’s struggling to keep up. The drop into the key change is awkwardly placed right at the end giving it no time to properly land, and the synths are hazy and shallow. Stump deserves to be judged harshly because he’s a perspicacious songwriter with significant potential, but the motley construction of this song shows some of the growing pains intrinsic to the transition he’s trying to make. Next to the phenomenal “Spotlight (Oh Nostalgia)” it puts the consistency of his forthcoming album in doubt.
[5]

Al Shipley: I’ve been rooting for Stump to actually get to release his album with some degree of commercial success with the knowledge that that would invariably involve some awkwardly deployed guest rappers. What I didn’t expect, however, was a forced attempt at Chicago’s answer to “Empire State of Mind.” If it gets the album in stores, though, I can deal.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: Patrick Stump does not have the easy charisma of Kanye West, but his answer to his fellow Chicagoan’s “Homecoming” has a chorus its equal. West would have been better advised to employ Stump, who’s more R. Kelly than Chris Martin is, for his hook. Never mind; the former Fall Out Boy’s paean to the City of the Broad Shoulders is an earnest love letter written with awkward prose in electric fire. Guest, Second City native, and sometime Kanye collaborator Lupe Fiasco tries to address the segregation paradoxically prevalent in a city so historically tied to African American hope, but only ends up with a line better suited to an essay on housing covenants or redlining than a pop song. (This is, unfortunately, an actual lyric: “The property value might go down to a level that’s economically unacceptable and socially taboo for us to live around you.”) It’s unnecessary, too: that Stump, who less than a decade ago sung the concertedly suburban anthem “Chicago is So Two Years Ago,” is now able to so naturally embrace the moves of R&B and Michael Jackson says far more than talk of gangs or real estate markets. Nonetheless for all the broad scope, there’s something lacking here, that same something that leads the chorus to culminate in the oddly unambitious “If I have my way I’m going to stay here.” As affectionate as is its treatment, it never accomplishes the earthy ground-level intimacy of something like BBU’s “Chi Don’t Dance.” This glitz is Magnificent Mile at best, but it hopes to unite the South Side with Wicker Park.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Cities are not lovable. They’re not even hateable. I was born in a suburb of Detroit that my Detroit friend can’t visualize and whose Wikipedia page sums up in a defeated visitors-bureau sigh of “shopping, dining and many cultural activities.” That was a year; another year was spent in Wilmington, Delaware, which exists for me as a pizza place and my aunt’s house, both of which were pasted into my memory years later. These cities threaten nothing for me but the memory of their existence. I grew up in Gibsonville, but all I remember is a home that upon revisiting is a houselike box, a main street that upon revisiting is a scab of ramshackle, anachronistic storefronts and a street grid that upon revisiting is the formaldehyde-filled nervous system of subdivisions I don’t recall. It threatens nothing but its prior impressions. Burlington became a highway exit with schools; Greensboro a half-revamped downtown and many strip malls arranged in a spittle splatter; Winston-Salem the same with less revamping and after spitting a stricter angle. Chapel Hill became a bed, some stores and a highway to an office; New York is becoming a different bed, different stores and the subway to a different office. Everything else is steel, documents, cruft: the same steel every building uses, the same documents that choke every local government and the same cruft suffocating every iteration of a life. You can understand cities, even to the point of suffusion, but you’ll never love them because they won’t love you. They can’t; they’re inanimate. The city didn’t get it made for you or break it for you. The city isn’t gentrifying itself — you know the assholes would’ve harnessed that by now — or adjusting its own property values. The city didn’t blink awake centuries ago and amuse its creaky timbers by min-maxing up a broken educational system. It only knows how to stand still as humans pour their humanity and their inhumanity, their synths and their anthems over its spires and down and through the ground, see the city slick with their reflected work and call it reciprocity.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Guys, I love cities. I was born in the smallish city where I currently live, but I grew up in a small town, and that was nice, but as soon as I could move I went to a city and I can’t imagine ever living ouside of one again (if I were American, I imagine I would have gone to school in NYC and never, ever left). I could give you some accurate-but-sappy-and-pretentious reasons why I love cities, but what it comes down to is this: I feel as strongly about certain cities as this song does, and I don’t even have the roots that Stump and Lupe clearly thrive on. Honestly, this song gets me a little choked up. Neither of them are blind to the faults of the city, but that’s not why you love a city, especially one you grew up in. When you love a city, you love it “from the problems, all the way to the solutions,” when it’s stupid hot, when there’s smog, when there’s gridlock, when your sports team loses, when gentrification hits, whenever. You’re in it for life, and with all the pro “country” boosterism these days (the scarequotes are for the number of those doing the boosting that live in, ahem, CITIES), we need a song too.
[9]

Jer Fairall: I suppose it’s a bit unfair to this that any such municipal ode immediately invites comparison to this song, for me, but seriously, Stump’s (and Lupe’s) conflicted observations go no deeper than a) here’s a bunch of crappy things about Chicago, and/but b) I’m from here, so it still rules anyway. That’s not even mentioning what a musical atrocity this is, with Stump’s always shrill faux-glam vocals taking on an even more infuriating degree of awfulness now that he’s switched to a mock-funky Timberlake-doing-MJ preen. And what of Lupe’s already fragile credibility? Consider it completely blown.
[1]

Alfred Soto: I could accept this “Ebony & Ivory”-style juxtaposition — privileged white boy getting schooled in hard knocks by earnest black guy — if the aptly named Patrick Stump didn’t sound like Steve Perry fronting a Timbo percussion loop from 2006. He’s got the looks and the money, but no brains. Don’t bore us with just a chorus.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Taken out of the context of mall-punk and into near-R&B territory, Stump’s soaring vocals don’t seem quite as special competing against an array of hook-singers — even though he’s his own hook-singer, if you know what I mean. The banality of the words in the verses is mitigated by a big chorus, sold baldly but completely by the truck driver’s key change at the end. Lupe Fiasco’s bit is boring but inoffensive and reads like I could have written it, yet there are enough moments of genuine passion to suggest that Stump’s versatility has only been hinted at thus far. The big chink in the armour is that he lacks his erstwhile lyricist’s ability to write the personal, nay the obscure, as universal.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: I kind of ignored Fall Out Boy, but this isn’t at all bad, a big soft rock number sung with some style and feeling, and Lupe contributes a very lively guest rap. I’m not so keen when he goes into his highest tones, but I am quite impressed with the rich arrangement and passion of the whole thing.
[7]