The ice in my glass had melted, watering down the good Scotch. I didn’t care. This wasn’t a story for sipping; it was a story for telling. Nelly had asked about the song, and now she was going to get the history lesson they never teach you.
“1973,” I said, my voice cutting through the bar’s chatter. “You have to understand what that year felt like for a man like David Rockefeller. It’s the key to everything.”
Nelly swiveled on her stool, all ears.
“Downtown, his life’s work was literally touching the sky. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Finished that year. And people in the know, they had a nickname for them. They didn’t call them North and South. They called them ‘David and Nelson.’ After the brothers. He didn’t just build skyscrapers; he built his own legacy in steel and glass, a permanent monument to the Rockefeller name. He looked at that skyline and he didn’t see New York. He saw his kingdom.”
I let that image hang in the air for a moment. The ultimate vanity.
“And in his head, the prophecy was crystallizing. He was a man of immense, world-shaping power, a patron of science and order. In his mind, the chaos of the world—the overpopulation, the ‘useless eaters’ draining resources—needed a savior. A technocratic messiah to implement a controlled, sustainable future. He started to truly believe it. That he was the one. Mashiach ben David. The Messiah, son of David. His own name, David, must have felt like destiny.”
I could see Nelly was hooked, her skepticism momentarily suspended by the sheer audacity of the idea.
“He was at his peak. The apex of his power and his delusion. And then… it hit the airwaves.”
I leaned in, lowering my voice to a near whisper.
“Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain.’ A song so viciously accurate, so perfectly aimed, it shattered the illusion. Think about it from his perspective. He’s in his office on the top of the ‘David’ tower, believing he’s a god-king, and this voice comes out of every radio, every record player in the city, singing directly to him.”
“‘You had one eye in the mirror’—his narcissism. ‘And the other on the eclipse’—his grand, gloomy vision for a depopulated planet. ‘You flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia’—his obscene, untouchable wealth. And the apricot scarf? The ultimate insult. It wasn’t just about suppressing the Hunza cancer cure; it was a symbol of his clinical, calculated heart. He thought he was wearing a badge of honor. Carly Simon framed it as the accessory of a villain.”
I took a long drink, the waterish Scotch doing nothing to dampen the fire of the story.
“She eviscerated him. She took his god complex and packaged it into a three-minute pop song for the masses to sing along to. She reduced the self-proclaimed messiah to a punchline. The towers might have been named ‘David and Nelson,’ but thanks to her, every time he heard that song, he remembered his other nickname: the guy who was so vain, he probably thought the song was about him.”
I set my glass down with a final thud.
“He thought 1973 would be the year he was crowned a messiah. Instead, it was the year Carly Simon crowned him the king of vanity. She didn’t just write a hit song; she performed a public exorcism on his delusions of grandeur.”