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ClearChannel Plays It Safe
mertzman writes: "Rather than wait for the government assaults on civil liberties to reach full steam, ClearChannel, one of the nation's largest radio networks, has decided to do some censorship on their own! According to F***edCompany, ClearChannel has created a list of banned songs with "questionable content" in light of the recent tragedies. Stuff ranging from Drowning Pool's "Bodies" to Nena's anti-war hit "99 Red Balloons" have made their list." ClearChannel owns many radio stations, so this probably affects you. Update: 09/18 18:30 GMT by M : The San Francisco Chronicle has more on this - ClearChannel says it isn't an official mandate, just some sort of internal memo circulating. Update: 09/18 23:18 PM GMT by T : Fuzzy points out that "snopes.com has an explanation of the ClearChannel hoax. ClearChannel has also sent out a press release saying they have released no such list."
If you care about music and still think that songs become popular because lots of people like them, you owe it to yourself to read some of this.
Back to the subject at hand, when a major corporate conglomerate decides that the country shouldn't be listening to "Bridge over Troubled Water" it is a sad day.
Yeah, they did screw up the lyrics in the English version (not to mention her singing of it).
The song is about WWIII, the end of the world, by accident, telling us to be careful about running off to war without a real solid reason and target (it started by them at a concert in West Berlin, wondering what would happen if the balloons floating to East Berlin were thought of as hostile).
They took pretty much everything in the songs out of context.
The song is directly, and utterly without metaphor, about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), and how the narrator's world hadn't been the same since, socially, politically, musically and personally.
McLean's point--and it's a pretty simple one; he isn't exactly James Joyce--is that that plane crash marked the end of the sheltered certainties of the 1950s and the start of what for him were the far more confusing and tumultuous 1960s (Dylan to cute Beatles to scary Beatles to the Summer of Love to Vietnam to Janis Joplin to more, scarier Vietnam).
"American Pie" isn't a deep song or a complex one, nor is it one open to terribly flexible interpretation. Which doesn't mean it isn't heartfelt or affecting or a good starting point for high school students to look at the 1960s from the perspective of someone whose world changed on February 3, 1959, when a plane crash killed three rock'n'roll singers. Period. It's not a "secret". It's not a "wacky interpretation". It's not a "hidden meaning". It's what the song's about. Sort of like how, say, John Lennon's "Oh, Yoko" is about Yoko and not about, say, the Iranain revolution or basketball.
Ask your parents. Or read any of the thousands of tedious interviews poor Don McLean has had to slog through in the decades since.