I grew up 55 miles south of Toledo. There’s a song by John Denver called “Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio.” Google on the first line “Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio is like being nowhere at all” for the complete words.
As made popular by Elvis…
Neil Young’s “Albuquerque” doesn’t exactly speak ill of the place, but it’s certainly not complimentary, either (“They say Santa Fe is less than ninety miles away/And I got time to roll a number and rent a car”).
Does every mention of Mo-town count? Many of them are complimentary, so maybe not, but there’s way too many songs that use that nickname to count.
Rancid has a song called Detroit who’s chorus includes “I gotta good feeling in a bad city tonight” and talks about being mugged and detained illegally with a drunken priest and a hooker, that’s good for tourism.
Dozens of country singers have covered an ode to homesickness about being stuck in Detroit:
“My kinfolks think I’m big in Detroit City
From all the letters that I write they think I’m fine
By day I make the cars but by night I make all the bars
Oh if only they’d just read between the lines
But now I wanna go home I wanna go home
Oh how I wanna go home”
Kid Rock and Eminem both seem proud to be from a city they’re simultaneously ashamed by, go figure. Makes sense, since we’re sorta conflicted about a lot of homegrown stars too. It’s like “Yay, we were Motown!” but “Oooh, sorry bout that Nugent/Kiss/Alice Cooper/whomever thing we foisted off on the rest of y’all.”
A lot of rappers rap about just how badassed they are for being from here, I particularly liked this line “In Detroit, you’ll be lucky if your not a victim of a shooting. In Detroit, crack-head zombies still prostituting.” in one by Esham. 