The music has certainly died in America. No matter how painful it is to admit, this nation is but a shadow of its former self. Webster’s defines “shadow” as “an imperfect and faint representation.” This is not your grandfather’s America.
Perhaps that is why American Pie was so poignant and why it hit a nerve with America. Released in 1971, the year I graduated from high school, there was an eeriness to the song that none of us could put a finger on. But yes, something about the song did “touch us deep inside.” The decade of the ‘70s certainly left a mark on the souls of all who lived through those times.
It was as if we had been traumatized by the social revolution we had just lived through including “Four-dead-in-Ohio,” the murder of the Kennedys, King, and Christian morality, causing a slow bleed-out of the American dream most of us had grown up in. We couldn’t really put our fingers on it because it wasn’t a single sniper shot that did it, but a slow agonizing cancer that took years to suck the life out.
But we felt the wound, we knew something had ...
