The 59 Sound Analysis Essay

The text that I will be analyzing is the song “The ’59 Sound,” by The Gaslight Anthem. The Gaslight Anthem is a punk rock band that comes from New Brunswick. Many of their songs have tangled, cryptic lyrics which makes it difficult to determine what they are about exactly, but they always tend to be melancholy. The music sounds just like a pretty normal energetic rock song. The illusion of life perspective will provide the lens to find underlying meaning in this particular song. I expect to find that the music and the lyrics will take the listener in different directions with the song.
This song always evokes emotion regardless of this fact. The lyrics of the song when you first listen sound like Brian Fallon, the front man for The Gaslight
It goes back to a plane crash in 1959 that killed three promising rock and roll artists- Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson. It was “the day that music died” that Don McLean wrote about in his song “American Pie.” It asks if you heard the chains in the hospital walls. This to me means that someone in a hospital may not have lived or been living a perfect life. The next verse has lines that suggest someone was killed in a car accident that prove this. The lines that lead us to believe this is true are “were you scared when the metal hit the glass” and “when your spirit left your body.”
At first I thought that the music was not in tandem with these lyrics at all. The lyrics have such depression in them at first while the music itself is so peppy and upbeat. I could not understand how they worked together. That for me was the site of struggle. Hegemonic norms tell us that songs about death and sadness should be slow and heavy. This song has such energy to it and resists hegemonic norms so that it couldn’t possibly fall into the category of death. I listened to the song a few more times and I realized that the song was not just a sad retelling of a story, but it is a memorial of