Americans have long wanted the perfect endless summer. Jimmy Buffett offered them one

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It seemed wistfully appropriate that news of Jimmy Buffett’s death emerged at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, the point of every American summer’s symbolic end.

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.”

Here was the funny thing, though: In that song, the unrepentantly inland Montana became his beach, his paradise of the moment. 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. Americans have always romanticized the frontier — the edge of civilization, the place whose exploration defined them. But the frontier was, of course, a lonely and dangerous place. 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 ways possible. In the universe of his songs, the beach was a safe frontier that you could explore if you wanted to.

Buffett and his music — and the empire they begat — became pivotal figures in that claiming and invention. Through them, the off-the-grid sensibility and the loud-shirt aesthetic were vigorously mainstreamed and popularized.

 

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