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Jimmy Buffett, the chiller laureate of Key West, died on Friday at 76. His legacy goes effectively past music: He additionally parlayed the facility of his loyal group right into a enterprise empire.
First, listed below are 4 new tales from The Atlantic:
A Distinctly American Determine
When you have by no means spent a lunch hour in Occasions Sq. on the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour on the 5 o’Clock Someplace bar upstairs, enable me to color an image: An unlimited shiny flip-flop greets you on the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. An enormous duplicate of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes by the ground of the restaurant. Must you select to ascend, a protracted elevator trip delivers you to the top-floor bar, which options turquoise furnishings, tequila drinks on supply, and a ravishing view of Manhattan. Some components of Margaritaville are kitschy, and a few are charming. However above all, whenever you’re there, you don’t overlook for one second that you’re in a Margaritaville.
Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times life-style, deserves to be remembered for extra than simply his music (enjoyable although it could be). Buffett additionally parlayed his identify recognition right into a enterprise empire that, beginning with the primary Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to incorporate resorts, eating places, meals, and merchandise; Buffett grew to become a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many followers, referred to as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base right into a loyal group of shoppers. Past the Parrot Heads, he additionally reached hungry and thirsty guests of all stripes: Some 20 million folks go to Margaritaville-branded institutions yearly.
In recent times, quite a lot of manufacturers have turn into obsessive about constructing group. Tech start-ups particularly have glommed on to it as a advertising buzzword. If folks really feel linked to a model, the considering goes, they may purchase extra stuff. Buffett was an early grasp of this artwork: He was promoting items and providers, however he was additionally providing a way of belonging. And although it has turn into de rigueur for celebrities to hawk branded merchandise, be it skincare or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product gross sales for many years.
Buffett was a multi-hyphenate earlier than it was cool. He first grew to become referred to as a musician, along with his seashore hit “Margaritaville” in 1977 and, the following yr, his cheeky “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He was additionally an creator: Beginning in 1989, each his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Occasions best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, together with Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway present. Margaritaville offered frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a way of life. The New York Occasions reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, an organization with ties to greater than 100 eating places and resorts, introduced in $2.2 billion in gross annual income final yr, largely by licensing and branding offers. Although Margaritaville Resort Occasions Sq. just lately started Chapter 11 chapter proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly nonetheless investing in new properties.
For a person who made his identify on visions of rest, Buffett obtained issues finished. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Occasions Journal in 2018, “Mr. Buffett continues to be the lone occupant within the Venn diagram of Folks Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and Folks Who Are Mistaken for Males of Leisure.” Although a 23andMe check reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not associated to Warren Buffett, the 2 males grew to become mates, and the latter supplied enterprise recommendation to the previous; Jimmy referred to as him “Uncle Warren.” (The Oracle of Omaha can be an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises by subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)
Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Final yr, Nick Paumgarten wrote a protracted dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a “55 and higher” active-living group in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville supplies its older residents—even when it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us—our suburban take away, our reliance on vehicles, our dwindling circles of mates, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the sort described by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone,’” Paumgarten writes, “then the answer, particularly for these tilting into their lonelier aged years, would appear to be fellowship, exercise, enjoyable. Within the Margaritaville calculus, the advantages of fine firm outweigh the deleterious results of alcohol.” (Because it occurred, Paumgarten’s article was printed the day earlier than my first go to to the Occasions Sq. location subsequent to my then-office; the candy—and in addition totally capitalist—context about Buffett’s empire enhanced what was already a novel expertise.)
Buffett’s Florida improvement, Paumgarten wrote, “got here off each as an escape from America and because the most quintessentially American setting of all.” And Buffett himself was a distinctly American determine—a canny self-mythologizer who introduced folks pleasure and made superb cash alongside the way in which. I hope you all will embrace your license to relax in his honor. As they may say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o’clock someplace.
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Night
The Novel That Helped Me Perceive American Tradition
By Rafaela Bassili
Rising up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent lots of my waking hours studying American young-adult books, rigorously finding out the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t at all times fantastically written, however I cherished all of them the identical, the way in which one other child might need cherished dinosaurs: I used to be compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking heaps, and malls; their descriptions of what ladies within the U.S. ate and the way they lived. None of it had something to do with me, so I used to be shocked when, at 16, I noticed myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled aspect to a language I had solely skilled as useful and inflexible.
With a diligent thirst for data, I started to know Plath’s status as an archetypal mid-century American lady. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visible mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, pictures of John and Jackie Kennedy crusing—that developed alongside the infant increase.
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P.S.
Tom right here, peeking in after studying Lora’s essay on Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s final public look was simply up the way in which from me right here at a venue in Rhode Island, and after I heard he’d died, I used to be on my method to a close-by seashore. I reminisced with my spouse a bit as we drove to the shore about how I didn’t recognize Buffett after I was rising up, largely as a result of “Margaritaville” was overplayed after I was a youngster. Additionally, I didn’t actually get that entire Gulf and Western sound. My New England (I used to be raised close to the mountains) doesn’t appear to be Jimmy Buffett’s pure surroundings: The seashore is much, the water’s chilly, and the primary snows come quickly after the final seashore day.
However after I moved to Rhode Island in my 20s, I spent my first summer time on the seashore and the Newport bars, the place Buffett’s music was in every single place. At some point, I heard “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” and it clicked. The seashore wasn’t actually the purpose. The palm timber and tropical nights and metal drums? These have been simply the decor. That day in Newport, I spotted that you just didn’t want a seashore to like Jimmy Buffett, whose music was so variety, so American, and so enjoyable. The subsequent day, I went to the native report retailer and acquired my first Buffet CD. After that, regardless of the place I lived, I at all times had a seashore and a pal.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this text.
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