American Pie- Don McLean (1971)

Rating-- 7.5/10

I know this song from the Weird Al Yankovic version about Star Wars, mostly, but I'm very aware of its place in pop culture. Today was the first time I heard it in its entirety. There are a few things I got from it-- for example, saying the "music died" that day remind me of people in the comment section saying music "stopped being good" in 2005 or something. But it is also this song, "American Pie" by Don McLean, that is the reason why the day Buddy Holly and two other rock 'n roll musicians died in that infamous plane crash is the "day the music died". It is a good song that remarks that music has already died.

I'm just thinking about how Aretha Franklin died yesterday-- it was really sad and really sudden, but it probably would have been infinitely more so for a generation of kids who grew up on rock music in the style of Buddy Holly and the 1950s, and then their young idol is dead-- the "good old boys with their whisky and rye" and their loss of innocence at the shock of it all.

About the "death of music" thing, the funny thing is that it makes a reference to the change in rock music that Don McLean was used to, how regular, kind of playful, childish, etc. rock 'n roll (or even just pop music of the time) in the style of Elvis Presley ("the king") and The Beatles make way to more folk-influenced, thoughtful, and pseudo-philosophical music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and that is what I make of the lines "and while Lennon read a book on Marx/the quartet practiced in the park".

And then the 1970s go on, one of my very favorite decades for music.