Paul McCartney followed this new trend when he wrote the seven-minute single "Hey Jude," which became one of The Beatles’ biggest hits in their entire career, and Don McLean's "American Pie," with a total running time of 8 minutes, 36 seconds, later topped the chart. Some people also argue "MacArthur Park" is not only composed of impressively visionary lyrics, but it’s also a very important song in the history of music as it was the longest hit single at the time and paved the way for other musicians to lengthen their top songs. It turns out there were no metaphors or hidden context in the misunderstood song, but it was a straight-forward story of exactly what Webb witnessed in MacArthur Park. Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. Why would someone leave a cake out in the rain and why do you need to make the cake when it’s already made? Webb kept the true meaning of the song hidden for decades until he finally explained in a 2014 interview with Newsday.
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The confusing lyrics have driven people crazy trying to analyze the strange metaphors. One of the reasons the song is hated by so many is because of the difficulty of interpreting the song’s meaning as it seemed to just be a collection of gibberish, and the widespread belief was that it was just another drug song written on hardcore psychedelics with no significance at all. Humorist Dave Barry called MacArthur Park “the worst song ever written” with “the worst lyrics” in his 1997 book Dave Barry’s Book Of Bad Songs, and many critics have agreed.
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MacArthur Park Is A Story About One Of Jimmy Webb's Relationships Despite being considered by many critics to be the “worst song ever written,” the song has charted again and again, proving to be the strangest top 40 hit in history. Listeners everywhere drove themselves crazy trying to understand what the story of this cake was. However, Jimmy Webb’s 1968 eccentric composition "MacArthur Park" still confused the masses who had already been accustomed to the ‘60s standard of weird. Psychedelic, bizarre songs composed of absurd lyrics dominated the airwaves so much throughout the 1960’s, that people even stopped questioning the strangeness of these tunes. See, rain is not good for cakes, you don't have to be Betty Crocker to know that, but as a metaphor a green cake melting in the rain is just silly.
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That's an article of faith in popular music of the latter half of the 20th century - many artists have written or belted out terrible cliches or atrocious rhymes, but nothing touches "MacArthur Park," a heartfelt elegy for a rain-ruined cake. "MacArthur Park," a hit for Richard Harris, Waylon Jennings, the Four Tops and Donna Summer, has the worst lyrics ever written.