Parodies, Revisions and Uses
In 1999, "Weird Al" Yankovic did a Star Wars–inspired parody of "American Pie". Titled "The Saga Begins", the song recounts the plot of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace from Obi-Wan Kenobi's point of view. While McLean gave permission for the parody, he did not make a cameo appearance in its video, despite popular rumor. McLean stated he was very pleased with the parody. He even admits to almost singing Yankovic's lyrics at live shows, because his children played the song so often.
In 2009, in the midst of Youtube's economic crisis, Hank Green wrote a parody about Youtube and Hulu almost buying Youtube.
Former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten played an adapted version of "American Pie" when opening for Jefferson Starship on August 9, 2005, the tenth anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death. Constanten altered the lyrics to allude to Jerry's death and how he heard the news by a phone call from Bruce Hornsby.
The City of Grand Rapids, Michigan created a lip dub video to "American Pie" in response to a Newsweek article that stated the city was "dying". The video was hailed by many as a fantastic performance (including Roger Ebert, who said it was "the greatest music video ever made.")
Read more about this topic: American Pie (song)
Famous quotes containing the word revisions:
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)