One of the indicators of a given city's cultural power could be the number of musical, literary, or cinematographic creations dedicated to it. That is, how many songs, novels, or films feature it as a setting or, even better, as a protagonist.
I am convinced that, if we were to create a ranking of the most culturally inspiring cities in the world, the top ten would not necessarily include the most populated cities, nor even the richest or those with a higher well-being index. Therefore, I suspect that in the top positions of this list we would not find megalopolises inhabited by millions of people, modern cities of steel and glass built in the middle of the desert thanks to petrodollars, nor certain cities in northern Europe where everything is orderly, efficient, and profoundly boring.
In this global league of culturally inspiring cities, we would have to look for iconic, authentic cities, with soul, with appeal, with charisma... Cities that have what in southern Spain they call "duende." But what elements give a city "duende"? Thinking about it a bit, it occurs to me that a city with "duende" must have a long history, also splendid urban planning and architecture, but, above all, it must be endowed with a marked character of its own that makes it unique, unrepeatable. In this last point, the great artists who have taken them as a source of inspiration for centuries have a lot to say.
Because culturally inspiring cities are, evidently, a motor of creation for musicians, writers, filmmakers, painters, and other artists, but, at the same time, the works of these creators end up greatly impacting the perception people have of them. They contribute, decisively, to filling them with meaning. They turn them into something mythical, iconic. I think, for example, of Woody Allen, Paul Auster, or Frank Sinatra and New York, of Canaletto and Venice, of Orhan Pamuk and Istanbul, of James Joyce and Dublin, of Carlos Gardel and Buenos Aires, or of Marlene Dietrich and Berlin.
In 2018, the German vacation rental search engine Holidu and the world's largest song lyrics catalog, musixmatch, jointly conducted a study to discover which were the most sung cities in the world. To do this, they analyzed all song lyrics that mentioned a city, around fourteen million.
The result was as follows: New York was the most mentioned city in songs. Specifically, it appeared in 30,867 musical tracks. In the musical popularity top ten, it was followed, at a considerable distance and in this order, by Paris, London, Rome, New Orleans, Miami, Berlin, Atlanta, Houston, and Tokyo. Barcelona, at that time, occupied the 29th position in the ranking, seven places below Madrid.
Culturally inspiring cities are a driving force for artists' creation and, at the same time, the works of these creators have a huge impact on the perception people have of them.In quantitative terms,perhaps we are not the most musically inspiring city in the world, but no one will be able to dispute our status as a hit songof songs likeBarcelonaof Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé,Barcelona and Iof Joan Manuel Serrat and, of course,Gypsy Sorceressof Peret.
On another occasion, in that same space, we will talk about inspiration in novels. In this area, I believe that Barcelona, as a culturally inspiring city, plays a much better role.