Sing the lyrics “My My Hey Hey”. Now sing “So Bye Bye Miss American Pie”
They kinda sound alike. And My My is saying how “Rock and Roll will Never Die”. while American Pie is about the day the music died.
Wonder if Don McLean did that on purpose?
That song is full of alliteration.
I remember “Rust Never Sleeps” from nearly the day it was released. I always took the “rock and roll is here to stay” line as a jab at disco music, and the rest of the song(s) as an ode to rock and roll excesses.
Not really. Let’s cast the Neil Young song in the key of E minor.
“My” ==> home key, E minor, melody note B (the fifth)
“My” ==> D major passing chord, melody note A (the fifth of D)
“Hey” ==> passing note of B on the sustained D maj (same note as the first “My”)
"Hey ==> C maj 7 with melody line G-E (fifth then third of a C chord)
The Don McLean isn’t in a minor key at all, it’s in a major. Let’s cast it in G major for some rough consistency.
“Bye” ==> home key G major, melody note D (the fifth)
“Bye, Miss A-” ==> C major, with melody note C (repeated for all three syllables)
“-merican” ==> G major again, melody note descends B-A-G
“Pie” ==> D major, melody goes back up a step to the A
Melody lines by themselves:
My My Hey Hey: 5, 4, 5, 3-1
Bye Bye Pie: 5, 4, 4, 4, 3-2-1, 2
Don’t see or hear any resemblance. They both go downhill rather than uphill but that’s about it.
It’s a song about the Sex Pistols!
This is the story of Johnny Rotten.
Too bad ol Neil got confused about which member of the Sex Pistols died and which didn’t.
It’s better to burn out than fade away.
According to this genius annotation (FWIW), it’s a response to Johnny Rotten’s comments after Elvis died. I’m not exactly sure what the point is personally.
“The King ate banana sandwiches they were delicous
This is the story of Sidney Vicious.”
Well…there’s a little rhyming but…others have throughly debunked the notion. And thank you for the breakdown up there.
Not necessarily. I think Young was saying the story of Johnny Rotten was a demonstration of how fading away was a worse fate than burning out. Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious died in the seventies but they’re still famous. John Lydon’s alive but nobody cares.
Except that Elvis faded out over the last decade of his life, before dying, Sid Vicious hadn’t died yet by the time the song was recorded, and Johnny Rotten had only just stopped being the ‘flavour of the week’, so would have been considered to have burned out rather than faded away.
Right, and the song was written right after Johnny Rotten left the Sex Pistols, in early 1978 (after terrible U.S. tour experience). That’s the reference to johnny Rotten and burning out - He left/ended the Sex Pistols at the height of their fame.
I, for one, consider listening to the electric version of the song to be the better way to understand its meaning. It’s essentially grunge before there was a word to describe it, and it’s my understanding that it was born out of Young’s feeling that his generation was fading into irrelevance, the hippy dream was dead, and that it was the rockers who died young that’d be better remembered than those who’d lived on like himself.
I mean, it’s no coincidence that a certain suicide note concluded thusly;
He doesn’t really say that anyone died. The king is gone, but he’s not forgotten…It’s better to burn out than to fade away could just mean that it’s Neil’s opinion that Rotten’s schtick didn’t have staying power.
I did not know that! That puts a whole new interpretation that I’d completely missed. I apologize, Neil.
That sounds like a suicide note written FOR a suicidal person, then one written by the actual person.
IM JUST SAYING IM JUST SAYING…doesn’t even mean he didn’t commit suicide.