Enjoy your cheeseburgers in paradise, good sir.
The 1970s singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffet died on the first of September, just in time for Labor Day Weekend and the unofficial close of summer 2023 in the USA. His obituary in the Associated Press by a 30-year careerist is a lovely example of how contemptibly smug these propagandists are even as they lie to your face regarding the latest manufactured crises designed to impoverish and immiserate people who actually work for a living:
These days, summer ain’t what it used to be. With apologies to Buffett and the Beach Boys, the notion of an “endless summer” has a different, more unsettling connotation after these climate-change-inflected months of dangerous heat and devastating wildfires in places like Maui. Five years ago, even Paradise burned. And the sun-saturated Buffett himself, according to his official website, died of a rare form of skin cancer. So “watching the sun bake” has become a statement with multiple layers, and some of them are more rueful than relaxing.
In keeping with the current narrative, the arson-driven wildfires (hundreds of arrests so far in the U.S. and Canada) are a result of “climate change,” as was the massacre-by-directed-energy-weapon in Maui. Yes, we had to bring all that into the obituary, because it’s critical that readers learn the catechism.
The writer also gets the order of Buffett’s hits wrong. “Come Monday” was his first single. Released two summers before 1977’s “Margaritaville,” it is an outlier in his discography, as its lyrical setting is nowhere near the Florida Keys, the Caribbean, etc. The rest is a sloppily written, pulled-out-the-backside rambling on the niche culture Buffett came to represent.
I can only imagine the “another dead Boomer—good!” schadenfreude to come on the chan boards. Although I’ve never had the money for the boating-and-boozing lifestyle (the class distinctions are what interests me, as my impecunious and ill-born self is not invited to most of these niche culture things the media likes to promote), it is still sad. It’s a passing, a corner turned. Of course, Buffett was never going to have another hit on the radio had he lived. Besides, what radio? And it was a very niche audience. Enough to sustain a merchandise line and a restaurant, sure, but no one outside his aging fanbase knows who Buffett was.
I’ll dare to point out that Jimmy Buffett was an upper-middle class white culture thing. The culture and the demographic are already well down their decline towards extinction. Some people might chortle and gloat for that. All I have to say is, after said extinction, everything you love will last only so long until the next severe thunderstorm knocks the power out, this time for good. Enjoy your clean water while it lasts, too.
Jimmy Buffett and what he represented were a small flicker of light in an increasingly awful and coarsening darkness. His career managed to survive for longer than it had a right to in a barren musical landscape in which hip-hop, pop country, and “classic rock” (radio music from the mid-1960s to 2001) are all you’ll find on broadcast. Now Buffett’s light is out. It had to go sometime, but its passing still stings. It’s a reminder that what’s left of fun and joy are fading fast as the evil that rules this world consolidates its gains.
As the poet Charles Bukowski asked in regards to himself and other artists, “Where are the replacements?” There are, of course, none. The decades have stopped, as one commentator observed, and this world is winding down to its end.
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The following photo is of myself in 1987, wading off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. My long-ago decadent weeks spent in a beachfront rental was as close as I ever got to the whole Parrothead lifestyle.
