![]() “It’s over-the-top and chintzy, but that’s part of the charm.” “The ‘warm-weather-beach-day’ aesthetic and kitsch has enough self-awareness in it that even if you don’t like Buffett, you can’t help but chuckle at it,” says Chinetti. Chinetti points to a certain self-awareness inherent in Buffett music and the surrounding Margaritaville culture that tends to keep everyone laughing with Buffett, rather than rolling their eyes at the beach bum-turned- multi-millionaire entrepreneur. ![]() It’s a sense of humor the brand itself seems to share with this latest generation of Buffett-loving cynics. “There’s a big sense of humor, or at least distance, that I’ve found exists more in younger fans than older fans.” “I feel like many of the younger folks I know enjoy Buffet a bit more ironically - for lack of a better word - than their parents,” she tells InsideHook. As Kat Chinetti, a 22-year-old Buffett fan and host of the podcast We Should Do This Again Sometime, points out, even the most ardent young Buffett lovers tend to approach their fandom with a level of generationally on-brand irony. That said, Buffett’s youngest fans aren’t all wide-eyed disciples of the Margaritaville creed. We’re similar in far more ways than we are different,” he adds. “I think the Buffett fandom is a beautiful representation of the human race. “Part of my love and fascination with Buffett is that people of completely different age ranges, colors, creeds and backgrounds feel a very unique yet similar feeling when they hear his music,” he tells InsideHook. Zach, a 19-year-old MargU ambassador at the University of Michigan who says he was “introduced to Jimmy Buffett in the womb,” echoes those sentiments, waxing a bit poetic about Buffett’s capacity to unite fans of all kinds. “It’s an inclusive brand of relaxation and positive vibes.” “Margaritaville speaks to every age, every background, every gender,” says Christian, a Margaritaville U alum who became an ambassador for the program in 2017. Indeed, while businessman Buffett’s Margaritaville empire includes a chain of retirement communities built to nurture aging Parrotheads through that next chapter, it also features a campus ambassador program for co-ed Keets ready to spread their wings at Margaritaville University. ![]() “The biggest misconception of the brand is that it is just for older people from like 50 and up who are entering the next chapter in life,” says Christian, a 23-year-old Buffett fan who says he’s been “a full blown Parrothead” since 18. Baby Buffett fans - called “ Keets,” like parakeets - may often be “grandfathered into” the fandom by their Parrothead parents, as one college-aged Buffett stan told Leah Prinzivalli for Vice back in 2017, but there’s more to the Buffett fanbase than boomer dads in Hawaiian shirts. While the septuagenarian - who released his 30th studio album last month at the age of 73 - may be the boomer Taffy Brodesser-Akner has credited with embodying a laid-back counterpart to the Yuppie generation, his popularity continues to prove generationally transcendent. This is true of many of Buffett’s millennial and Gen Z fans - and yes, he has them. Spawn of Parrotheads who spent the ’80s tailgating at Buffett concerts where they built their very own “coconut telegraph” and hosed each other with beer-filled parrot-shaped squirt guns, I was born into Jimmy Buffett fandom. The second was Britney Spears, but while I recognized Britney as a celebrity, a public figure of mass appeal, Jimmy Buffett had held such an inescapable presence in my life from birth that he felt more like some kind of omnipresent entity with whom I was personally connected, like my parents or God or Santa Claus. Jimmy Buffett was the first musician I was ever aware of as a child. Back in 2020, we published this deep dive into his generation-spanning appeal. Update: Jimmy Buffet died at age 76 on Friday, September 1.
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