Recent reveals over the meaning of Don McLean’s classic have shown once again how much fans love to turn detective when singers remain mysterious
radio staple the world over, Don McLean’s American Pie cemented itself into the ears of listeners thanks to a melodic journey that tells a story of America and, presumably, a loss of innocence that was roiling the country during the time of its 1971 release. But what the singer-songwriter was actually trying to convey has been up for debate for the past half-century, with generations of fans and critics dissecting every nuance of its nearly nine-minute runtime.
While its lyrics center on the tragic February 1959 plane crash that took the life of rock’s earliest stars Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens, listeners have debated who and what else the song is referring to since the 70s. For starters: no, Janis Joplin wasn’t the “the girl who sang the blues” and Elvis wasn’t the “king” MacLean was talking about. According to Spencer Proffer, the documentary’s producer: “Every time you listen, you think of something else.
It’s all another hotly debated, musical Rorschach test. Christians who have taken the song as their own may be surprised to learn that Cohen was actually deeply passionate about his Jewish faith. “The word Hallelujah appears across religions and faiths,” explained author Alan Light, who wrote a book about the song. “People take what they need from it and what they want it to be. I think that’s why it’s played everywhere from weddings to funerals and births.
Conceived as both an audio and visual album, listeners and critics have dissected it all: from the personal allusions , to its political and social ones . No wonder the layered entirety of Lemonade is still considered the singer’s best.One of the most acclaimed and often-played songs in music history is also the most widely misunderstood.
Carter himself might be surprised to hear that Lennon once described the track in no uncertain terms as, well, downright communist: “‘Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics,’ is virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement,” he once said. That didn’t stop the past 50 years of listeners from taking a microscope to potential meanings, or worse, inserting their own.
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