Fletcher… Setzt er sich eigentlich auch mit dem American Dream auseinander oder ist das eher ein Randthema, weil es ja offensichtlich um Musik geht.
Den Text zu Don McLeans Song „American Pie“ halte ich für die treffendste Auseinandersetzung mit dem ‚Amerikanischen Traum‘ bzw. mit den Leuten die davon träumten diesen Traum zu träumen. In diesem Song/Text geht es um amerikanische Helden (Film, Musik, Show-Biz usw.), vor allem aber auch um das sich wandelnde Kulturbild einer tief verunsicherten Gesellschaft der Unterschiede, für die dieser ‚American Pie‘ letztendlich als Synonym steht.
[Jim Fann schreibt dazu:]
McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience—something had been lost, and we knew it. Opening with the death of singer Buddy Holly and ending near the tragic concert at Altamont Motor Speedway, we are able to frame the span of years the song is covering—1959 to 1970—as the „10 years we’ve been on our own“ of the third verse. It is across this decade that the American cultural landscape changed radically, passing from the relative optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of these values by the various political and social movements of the mid and late 1960s.
Coming as it did near the end of this turbulent era, American Pie seemed to be speaking to the precarious position we found ourselves in, as the grand social experiments of the 1960s began collapsing under the weight of their own unrealized utopian dreams, while the quieter, hopeful world we grew up in receded into memory. And as 1970 came to a close and the world this generation had envisioned no longer seemed viable, a sense of disillusion and loss fell over us; we weren’t the people we once were. But we couldn’t go home again either, having challenged the assumptions of that older order. The black and white days were over.
Bye bye, Miss American Pie.
http://understandingamericanpie.com/index.htm
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