The Irony of Margaritaville
Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2021 7:14 pmCame across this article today. I'll include the link, although in all honesty, the bulk of the article is not worth reading. It's a critique of yet another Margaritaville-themed resort hotel, this one in Times Square, which is about as stupid as it sounds.
https://www.eater.com/22644505/margaritaville-times-square-new-york-hotel-restaurants
Around the middle of the article, however, I found this passage, four paragraphs quite a bit better than the rest of it, and very much in line with something that's always seemed painfully ironic to me.
It's always amazed me that this song about a clinically-depressed loser, slowly sliding downhill to alcoholism and probably an alcohol-related death, has become a byword for celebration and good cheer. Do people not know the lyrics? Or do they know them and not care?
https://www.eater.com/22644505/margaritaville-times-square-new-york-hotel-restaurants
Around the middle of the article, however, I found this passage, four paragraphs quite a bit better than the rest of it, and very much in line with something that's always seemed painfully ironic to me.
The song “Margaritaville,” which forever solidified Jimmy Buffett’s persona as the king of the beach bums, was off his eighth album, and it only took seven years between the release of “Margaritaville” the song (1977) and the opening of Margaritaville the restaurant (1984). The first location was in Alabama, as Buffett couldn’t get the trademark rights in Florida for the name “Margaritaville” because “there are so many using the name around the country,” he told the press at the time. Eventually, he won.
Margaritaville, the one Buffett sang about, is actually an awful place. He allegedly wrote it after ordering a margarita in Austin, Texas, and was also inspired by an influx of tourists to Key West, Florida, where he was living at the time. It’s about a man “wastin’ away” in a touristy beach town, whose only solace from hinted-about heartbreak and foot injuries is tequila. This is not a song about someone who rejects the pressures of workaday life in order to pursue radical pleasure. This is about a man who is depressed and perhaps on the run from the law, for whom shrimp and sea and tattoos provide no peace, and who needs blended beach drinks to “hang on” to whatever semblance of a life he has left. It is not escaping. It’s fleeing. And it’s sort of pathetic.
But fans have instead turned it into a “national anthem for generations of college kids on spring break, burnt-out stockbrokers, and wishful thinkers who long to leave careers behind and let their biggest worry be which beach to sleep on that night,” wrote Dan Daley for Mix. The song has been completely recontextualized so that not even Jimmy Buffett himself can declare this man’s life an unsalvageable mess. Instead of a song about despair, it’s a song about defiance, insisting despite all evidence to the contrary that you are having a good time.
It’s a specific type of fun, though. Jimmy Buffett made his name with “gulf and western music,” a style that combines American country and rock with instruments and tonalities more commonly found in the Caribbean. But while his songs are full of steel drums, lyrically they are mostly about being a white American man dreaming of a Bahamas without Bahamians. It’s an overworked man in a bar, imagining moving to an island paradise, without all the pesky stuff that’s already on the island. There are now more than 60 Margaritaville bars and restaurants across the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, selling this fantasy of “island” drinks and American foods with coconut or pineapple added to them, sometimes on top of the very places those flavors were taken from. It’s a shame, but not a surprise, how popular a sell that is.
It's always amazed me that this song about a clinically-depressed loser, slowly sliding downhill to alcoholism and probably an alcohol-related death, has become a byword for celebration and good cheer. Do people not know the lyrics? Or do they know them and not care?
