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Knowledge of a Song: American Pie In post-modern America, few songs have enjoyed the staying power possessed by Don McLean's 1971 classic, "American Pie." I chose to research this song because of its vast appeal to both adult and youth audiences. The results my research yielded astonished me. Previous to my lyrical examination of "Pie," I was unaware of McLean's many references to music, politics and religion. Neither was I aware of the song's actual meaning, outside of the reference to the deaths of then-popular artists Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, who all died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959. McLean made many points, some clear and others ambiguous, about the state of society at the time. In fact, the lyrics "American Pie" are so polysemous that it is quite impossible to summarize the song's symbols and meanings in two pages. After I decided on a song, all of my research was done via the world wide web. I used two search engines (yahoo and google) to begin the process. To find adequate results, I chose to use the words "american pie behind mclean" as my keywords for both searches. Not surprisingly, these searches yielded hundreds of pertinent results. Primarily, I used three websites to gather data. These three, which are listed at the end of my analysis, yielded more than enough for a brief yet thorough explanation of the song's meaning. As I said, the research results intrigued me. Before embarking on my lyrical analysis, I believe it is important to inform you that McLean himself has never fully divulged the entire meaning of his hit song. However, he has called "Pie" a complicated parable open to different interpretations. McLean says he intentionally made the song's meaning ambiguous in order to make a series of complex statements. With that said, there has been a broad spectrum of interpretations. I will merely give the ones that were the most common and best documented. "American Pie" is about McLean shifting his musical focus from the rock genre to folk music. It is evident that McLean was quite angered by artists who had become more concerned with money their music earned them rather than the music itself.
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