I, along with many of you, have had a great deal of time to think on matters under the various movement restrictions that have sprung up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet almost immediately following it and to this very moment I wonder what exactly that means. I was both surprised and filled with a bit of joy as I received nods and positive reactions to the statement from the assembled mourners. Before those gathered at his funeral, I made the comment that if I was to describe my father in one word, it was that he was authentic.
I’ve noted it in previous writings, but it brought about a new notion that has been bubbling about in my head in the couple of months that have passed since his death. As winter gives way to spring, this song doesn’t so much end as await the next verse, that which is to be written by us and subsequent generations.Īs I sat down to write my father’s eulogy, I thought about the generational rift between him and me.
It is fun to sing this song and recall the history it celebrates, but here is the chorus, now bugger off. But I feel the song begs the listener to stop listening, to go and carry on with their own life. The whole thing is rather anticlimactic as the midpoint of the song gets so catchy and energetic, but the song ends the same way a good party ends, with awkward silence and no clue what to do next. The song ends with a toast, a submissive last hurrah to the end of the age of music.
Sure it was terrible, but at least I could leave the house. With each succeeding crisis, I long for the pleasant bits of the last one. And here I am thinking of how 9/11 was my adulting baptism and how that was only the beginning of what has only been the constant always-already change that we live today. It was nostalgia that could prepare him to cope with change. This song was the epic poem of the death of my father’s childhood and the painful baptism of adulthood that constituted his 1980s. Charles Manson and his Helter Skelter race war failed, but had the Civil Rights movement succeeded? The move from Elvis to the Beatles is as traumatic as the move from the darkness of winter to the brightness of summer. Drugs take a long time to clear the system. The end of post-war America was one event, the plane crash mentioned above, yet the death of the 70s was to be much slower. Yet, oddly enough change itself changes in this song. The song was written to memorialise the end of post-war America as the 60s and 70s rolled in, but really the song alludes to the new change just ahead, the uncertain (and probably dystopic) future that would come to be known as the 1980s. Ironically it has a feedback loop of nostalgia built into it, much as American popular culture seems to have the same specialisation. Upon reflection the tune is at its heart a song about change. Perhaps my father fancied him as the music-and-joy-delivering god-protagonist engaged in maintaining the dance that would save our mortal souls as he went toe to toe with the devil. Beyond that, McLean refused to further elaborate on the song’s meaning and I’ll be damned if that isn’t the way of a true artist. The only definitive bit we know is that the ‘day the music died’ was 3 February 1959 when a plane crash killed rock and roll legends Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and ‘The Big Bopper’ J.P. It’s a hell of a story laced with historical reference and colourful allusions. That aural taste of the ‘old times’ even translates to the advanced digital music players of today.ĭon McLean’s American Pie was the 1971 song that everyone knows, but few know all the lyrics to. It was the kind of song that demands to erupt to life from the cacophony of battling frequencies that result when twisting the tuning nob of an old radio.
0 kommentar(er)
