By Michael F. Duggan
America’s favorite epicurean billionaire is gone at 76. He wrote some fun songs, and created and guarded a branding empire like a Gilded Age robber baron.
I was ambivalent about Buffett’s music, briefly embracing at fleeting moments during fleeting summers in my twenties, and I am sure that I knew some Parrot Heads. It was certainly a background mainstay of laidback summer drinking events at the shore. A lot of his songs are about drinking and now seem self-indulgent, self-centered, and even self-pitying (“A Pirate turns 40”).
But beyond a Dionysian celebration of drinking rum and braggadocio about the high-octane escapist lifestyle, what is there? Among his Greatest Hits are a couple of decent breakup/makeup songs (“Come Monday,” “Miss You so Badly”), and a few novelty songs (“Cheeseburger in Paradise,” Pencil-Thin Mustache,” “Why Don’t We get Drunk?”, and that really silly one about the volcano). This hardly puts him up there with Dylan or Lennon and McCartney, much less the Gershwin’s or T.S. Eliot. As a friend of mine pointed out, his most soulful song, one that is not about himself, may be “He Went to Paris,” which is thoughtful, sympathetic, and bittersweet.
He had a knack for melody, although sometimes they run together a little. But in general, Buffett seemed to be mostly about Buffett, and I suspect the appeal, beyond the facial allure of tropical carousing, was the fact that we could put ourselves in his shoes by singling along with him (if The Simpsons is to be believed, he did not let people cover his songs). Perhaps I am overthinking it and should take his music for what it is as a not insignificant contribution to the songbook of American summer vacation.
It seems fitting that he left us at the end of summer on Labor Day Friday.