Tortuous homilies, mealy-mouthed four-syllable rhymes and stilted diction—this is the kind of craftsmanship that Don McLean palms off as poetry. It's all here on his third album, just as it was on Tapesiry and American Pie, only more so and worse. The phenomenon of McLean has been as destructive to rock culture as any of the events he alluded to so coyly in "American Pie." "The day the music died." Indeed, dead is the way McLean would have it, so that his brand of pseudo-philosophic Muzak could take over the airwaves and concert halls and be worshipped for its canned "sensitivity."

The commercial and critical success of pretentious junk like "American Pie" can only be attributed, in my opinion, to the reactionary, complacent social climate of the Nixon Era. As a media campaign against rock, it was a brilliant sally that couldn't have been programmed better on a White House computer. Hearing a sanctimonious folkie like McLean lamenting the death of rock was like hearing Nixon lament the war while escalating the bombing. McLean would have us believe he is an artist—Dylan's successor—as Nixon would have us believe he is a statesman; in fact, both are egomaniacal politicians in quest of their own greater glory. Both men make lofty pronouncements that are either evasions or lies. Both have the moral semblance of humorless prigs.

McLean is, in a nutshell, Nixon's Dylan, the negative reflection of all the fine things Dylan represented and helped bring about during his peak creative years. The key to McLean's idea of himself and his own importance was contained in the wretched ballad "Vincent," in which he wasn't content to make a preposterous one-to-one identification with Van Gogh; he had to talk down to his subject, delivering perhaps the most narcissistic clinker in pop history: "But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you."

I've been discussing McLean the writer; McLean the musician is something else. "American Pie" and "Vincent," for example, are melodious, and in their different ways, above-average musical compositions. McLean is a good guitarist with a nice voice. The trouble with his singing is that he insists upon smugly emphasizing the "meaning" of his pap through retards and changes of vocal inflection. The aim, of course, is to project an image of stiff-upper-lip suffering that is metaphysically "serious."

Only one cut, "Dreidel," on the new album, has the musical stamina of "American Pie." A skidding, sliding rocker, with a bravura vocal by McLean (who goes into falsetto at the end), it is easily the album's best cut and the most impressive demonstration on record of his musical skills. "Dreidel" would be excellent if the words weren't so bad: "I feel like a spinnin' top or a dreidel/The spinnin' don't stop when you leave the cradle" ... and on and on into laborious imitation of "Mr. Tambourine Man": "My sky shoes are spiked with lead heels/I'm lost in this star car I'm drivin'/But my air soul keeps pushin' big wheels ..." The same energy, somewhat muted, is carried forward in "Narcissisma," a nonsense rocker that is musically interesting but too calculated to communicate the desired mood of playful spontaneity.

The quality of most of the rest of the songs ranges from mawkishness ("Oh My What a Shame," "The More You Pay," and "Bronco Bill's Lament") to the trashiest pontification ("Falling Through Time" and "The Pride Parade"). The sentimental songs are the least difficult to take because they have clear-cut subjects. The best of these is "Bronco Bill's Lament," the bitter reminiscence of a washed-up "singing" cowboy star who was owned by the studio and whose movie voice was dubbed. "Oh My What a Shame," a solemn ballad about different kinds of separation and loss, is delivered in McLean's moony minstrel style and contains such utterances as: "But like meteors that fell/Through moments parallel" and "When two people say goodbye/Oh my."

The philosophical meditations are the album's most ambitious and worst songs. "Falling Through Time," a clumsy attempt to "say everything," begins: "I can't answer the questions you ask me, I don't know what to say/The answers are somewhere lost in the stars when the night has turned to day ..." and becomes a monotonous procession of stupid cliches adding up to the observation: "But time and the universe are always the same." McLean's horribly icky "Birthday Song" begins on the same tack: "If I could say the things I feel, it wouldn't be the same/Some things are not spoken of, some things have no name."

Isolation, alienation, the inability to communicate—McLean hammers away at these hackneyed themes, piling gaffe upon gaffe, seldom willing to invent correlative imagery or to construct a narrative that would illustrate his ideas. Word-play is his game, and alas, he is terrible at it. "The Pride Parade," for instance, begins with a typically inane little paradox: "It started out quite simply, as complex things can do," and turns into a blanket indictment of an unspecified "you," to whom McLean clearly feels morally superior: "But you are surely just as evil as the worst my tongue can tell/For you'll never face my heaven and I'll not endure your hell." Ultimately, the single emotion that informs McLean's sensibility, one that comes through even in his inept and impersonal love songs, is cold hatred—of what or of whom we are never told, but it seems to extend in all directions. (RS 126)

STEPHEN HOLDEN