And Them Good Ole Boys Were Drinking Butterbeer And Pumpkin Juice

Hey, remember a few months ago when they auctioned off the original lyrics of "American Pie," complete with all Don McLean's original notes and annotations? That was supposed to answer all our questions about the meanings in the song. But so far, we haven't heard anything. I'm hoping whoever won the auction isn't just going to be a jerk about it and sit on the answers forever.

I was wondering this, because the situation with that song is in sharp contrast to works being created today. Just this past week, we saw headlines that JK Rowling was further explaining the Harry Potter story, in this case detailing Snape’s motivation.

Some people dislike this sort of thing, thinking that it takes away from the stories if we're going to find out after-the-fact that Dumbledore is gay, or Hermione should have married Harry or Sirius Black is lactose intolerant. But it seems to me that this fleshing-out of the background is just an inevitable part of the modern world. In a world where Rowling has almost six million Twitter followers, it's inevitable that she's occasionally going to pull back the curtain. I'm sure Tolkien often livened up dinner parties by dropping hints about his inspiration for Lord of the Rings characters. Difference is, there was no one there to report it to a wider audience.

So we probably all have to learn not to make a big deal every time an author gives us behind-the-scenes info. Certainly, we shouldn't keep turning it into a news story. Can you imagine what it would have been like off Twitter existed when "American Pie" came out? @realDonMclean would be inundated with questions about the song. Some 4chan’ers would threaten to kidnap his dog unless he confirmed that the Jester represents Bob Dylan.  It'd be a mess, and might have even lead to popular music getting dumbed down over the next twenty years.

And, further confirming my theory that you can find any combination of two geeky things on the Internet, here is the Harry Potter story, from Voldemort's perspective, to the tune of "American Pie."