But you could also sit back in a straw hut and hat, sip a Corona, contemplate your navel and your sins - and be left alone. ![]() In the universe of his songs, the beach was a safe frontier that you could explore if you wanted to. As Buffett rhapsodized, the sand-covered edge of the land that he so adored was also the edge of civilization - but only in the most appealing (and, not coincidentally, mostly apolitical) ways possible. But the frontier was, of course, a lonely and dangerous place. That's been a deeply American trope from the beginning.Īmericans have always romanticized the frontier - the edge of civilization, the place whose exploration defined them. In his hands, it became an aesthetic as much as a place - the anti-city, where the backbreaking labor and the cubicle blues could be left behind for a realm where real people roamed. Just as country music spent decades building “country” from an actual geography into an entire state of mind, Buffett - whose roots were in country and folk - did the same thing with the beach. That was part of why he resonated: because the metaphorical Buffett beach could be pretty much anywhere that contained people looking for a bit of peace. Here was the funny thing, though: In that song, the unrepentantly inland Montana became his beach, his paradise of the moment. paradise ("that night in Montana") and which he liked better. 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 feel at home down there.”Īnd there was “Come Monday,” in which a trip to do a gig in San Francisco - on Labor Day weekend, no less - became a meditation on city ("four lonely days in that brown LA haze") vs. There was of course “Margaritaville,” the song that launched 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). These days, for every piece of the culture that made the shoreline or the tropical island a potentially dispiriting place to become unanchored - “The Beach” or “Lost” or even, heaven help us, “Gilligan’s Island” - there is a counterbalancing Buffett song right there to tell you that at the edge of the land you can find peace, or at least a chance at it. ![]() That accounted for a lot of the mass appeal. He was hardly a critical darling, but he was, as he sang, “a pirate, 200 years too late” who believed that latitude directly impacted attitude. That train arrived at Margaritaville in the 1970s, and Buffett jumped aboard and became the conductor and chief engineer of its gently rebellious counterculture. It gained steam with the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello “Beach Blanket Bingo” years, the mainstreaming of surfing and beach-motel culture and the Beach Boys' “California Girls." And it continues unabated - just look to the dubious stylings of MTV's “Jersey Shore.” 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 brought back from the South Pacific after World War II. ![]() It balances out the times when the minefield of life explodes," he posted last year. ![]() “It’s important to have as much fun as possible while we’re here. From Margaritaville to the unspecified tropical paradise where he just wanted to eat cheeseburgers (“that American creation on which I feed”), he became a life's-a-beach avatar for anyone working for the weekend and hoping to unplug - even in the decades before “unplugging” became a thing. He was the man whose studied devil-may-care attitude became a lifestyle and a multimillion-dollar business - a connecting filament between the suburbs and the Florida Keys and, beyond them, the Caribbean. Because for so many, the 76-year-old Buffett embodied something they held onto ever so tightly as the world grew ever more complex: the promise of an eternal summer of sand, sun, blue salt water and gentle tropical winds. It seemed wistfully appropriate, somehow, that news of Jimmy Buffett’s death emerged at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, the demarcation point of every American summer’s symbolic end.
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