Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MoriartyL
Take Puff the Magic Dragon. Now ignoring whether or not it is about drugs, the music is just so... ordinary. It's completely predictable, and much too simplistic.
|
Peter, Paul, and Mary were members of the "Folk Music" movement, and Puff The Magic Dragon is a folk song. The idealogy of the folk music movement was to focus on meaningful lyrics and simple melodies played (at least initially) on a minimum of accoustic instruments. This was something of a knee-jerk reaction to the ever-increasingly complex arrangements of popular music of the 1950s (e.g. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, etc. who recorded albums with 30 or 40 piece orchestras backing them up, yet sang utterly vapid and often silly, meaningless lyrics).
The rumor that Puff The Magic Dragon is a song about drug use is a result of the older generation's witch-hunt for drug references in the music favored by the younger generation of the 1960s. As the lyrics show, it has nothing to do with drug use, but is about a boy abandoning his imaginary childhood friend.
Jefferson Airplane satirized that period's witch-hunt atmosphere by releasing "White Rabbit", a song with obvious drug references inspired by Lewis Carroll's book "Alice In Wonderland".
