"American Pie" is the baby-boom generation's elegy of choice for the Sixties, a requiem mass for a decade which for Don McLean, the song's writer and singer, ended much sooner than you might think, coming to a screeching halt sometime around the Summer of Love - just eight years after the tragedy McLean famously proclaimed "The Day the Music Died." Viewed half a century out from its introduction into the cultural consciousness, it sure seems like a strange choice for a generational anthem - a self-consciously mythopoetic campfire ballad surveying the changes wrought by the counterculture, and embracing a very different path forward. Perhaps "American Pie" has been poked and prodded so often, and by so many, that over time virtually all of its meaning has been lost. Or maybe it just never had much meaning to begin with.
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