It gave the impression wistfully suitable, come what may, that news of Jimmy Buffett’s death emerged at the starting of the Labor Day weekend, the demarcation level of each American summer time’s symbolic finish. Because for such a lot of, the 76-year-old Buffett embodied one thing they held onto ever so tightly as the global grew ever extra complicated: the promise of an everlasting summer time of sand, solar, blue salt water and mild tropical winds.
He was once the guy whose studied devil-may-care perspective was an approach to life and a multimillion-dollar trade — a connecting filament between the suburbs and the Florida Keys and, past them, the Caribbean. From Margaritaville to the unspecified tropical paradise the place he simply wanted to consume cheeseburgers (“that American creation on which I feed”), he was a existence’s-a-beach avatar for any person operating for the weekend and hoping to unplug — even in the a long time ahead of “unplugging” was a factor.
“It’s important to have as much fun as possible while we’re here. It balances out the times when the minefield of life explodes,” he posted last year.
The beach has stood in for informality and relaxation in American popular culture for more than a century, propelled by the early Miss America pageants on the Atlantic City boardwalk and the culturally appropriative “tiki” aesthetic that GIs introduced again from the South Pacific after World War II. It received steam with the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello “Beach Blanket Bingo” years, the mainstreaming of browsing and beach-motel tradition and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” And it continues unabated — just look to the dubious stylings of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”
That teach arrived at Margaritaville in the Nineteen Seventies, and Buffett jumped aboard and was the conductor and leader engineer of its gently rebellious counterculture. He was once rarely a vital darling, however he was once, as he sang, “a pirate, 200 years too late” who believed that latitude immediately impacted perspective. That accounted for a large number of the mass enchantment.
These days, for each piece of the tradition that made the coastline or the tropical island a doubtlessly dispiriting position to turn out to be unanchored — “The Beach” or “Lost” and even, heaven assist us, “Gilligan’s Island” — there’s a counterbalancing Buffett track proper there to let you know that at the fringe of the land you’ll in finding peace, or a minimum of a possibility at it.
There was once after all “Margaritaville,” the track that introduced a “Parrothead” empire, the one that prescribed taking time “watching the sun bake” and invoked “booze in the blender” and shrimp “beginnin’ to boil” (from which you can draw a direct line to the sensibility of seafood restaurant chains like Joe’s Crab Shack).
There was “Last Mango in Paris,” in which the singer had to “get out of the heat” to meet his hero, who told him to inhale all that life offers, and that even after that, “Jimmy, there’s still so much to be done.” There was “’Bama Breeze,” an ode to a bar along the Gulf Coast where “you’re one of our own” and, says the protagonist, “Good God, I believe at house down there.”
And there was once “Come Monday,” during which a commute to do a gig in San Francisco — on Labor Day weekend, no much less — was a meditation on metropolis (“four lonely days in that brown LA haze”) vs. paradise (“that night in Montana”) and which he preferred higher.
Here was once the humorous factor, despite the fact that: In that track, the unrepentantly inland Montana was his sea coast, his paradise of the second. That was once a part of why he resonated: as a result of the metaphorical Buffett sea coast might be just about anyplace that contained folks looking for a bit of peace.
Just as nation song spent a long time construction “country” from a real geography into a whole way of thinking, Buffett — whose roots have been in nation and folks — did the identical factor with the sea coast. In his palms, it was a classy up to a spot — the anti-city, the place the backbreaking hard work and the cubicle blues might be left in the back of for a realm the place actual folks roamed. That’s been a deeply American trope from the starting.
Americans have at all times romanticized the frontier — the fringe of civilization, the position whose exploration outlined them. But the frontier was once, after all, a lonely and perilous position. As Buffett rhapsodized, the sand-covered fringe of the land that he so adored was once additionally the fringe of civilization — however simplest in the maximum interesting (and, no longer coincidentally, mostly apolitical) techniques imaginable. In the universe of his songs, the sea coast was once a protected frontier that you need to discover for those who wanted to. But you need to additionally take a seat again in a straw hut and hat, sip a Corona, ponder your navel and your sins — and be left by myself.
In their 1998 e-book “The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth,” Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker hint the emergence of the sea coast as “a narcotic for holiday masses.” They write: “Before it could be transformed into a theater of pleasure, it had to be discovered, claimed and invented as a place apart from the messy business of survival.”
Buffett and his music — and the empire they begat — became pivotal figures in that claiming and invention. Through them, the off-the-grid sensibility and the loud-shirt aesthetic were vigorously mainstreamed and popularized.
All of his imagery, beach and beach-adjacent, shouted to us that there was a better, more relaxing way than regular daily life. It said that all those characters and people were waiting there for us with bare, sandy feet and cold beers and a bit of melancholy, and that we could jack into that sunny world and escape the monotony — for a long weekend or forever.
And therein lies a rub.
These days, summer ain’t what it used to be. With apologies to Buffett and the Beach Boys, the notion of an “endless summer” has a different, more unsettling connotation after these climate-change-inflected months of unhealthy warmth and devastating wildfires in puts like Maui. Five years in the past, even Paradise burned. So “watching the sun bake” has turn out to be a observation with more than one layers, and a few of them are extra rueful than stress-free.
Jimmy Buffett’s work was big on not reading too much into things. You could say, fairly, that his musical aesthetic was built around a three-word statement: Don’t overthink it. “Never meant to last,” he once sang. But as with most artists who echo resoundingly in the culture, his work — and, not incidentally, the legions of Parrotheads whose lifestyles he inspired — takes on additional dimensions when you pull the lens back and consider the broader shoreline.
That was true especially when the flip-flop fantasy collided with the reality that most people live. That collision took place at the intersection where Buffett was the most memorable, where the summer of the mind met the reality of the rest of the year. As he put it in “Son of a Son of a Sailor”: “The sea’s in my veins, my custom stays. I’m simply satisfied I don’t are living in a trailer.”
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Ted Anthony, the director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him at http://twitter.com/anthonyted