Neil Young's new album, Living With War, puts me back in touch with my idealism, which has been pummeled the last six years. He uses melodies he's used before, which some might call lazy and others might call expedient, and the album's raw, befitting a burst of creativity of less than three weeks, so it's not the kind that lends itself to critical parsing. It's bigger than that; so what if it's aesthetically uneven? It's ragged. It's also glorious. It's urgent. It has intent, purpose, power. It's album as change agent.
I'm proud of Neil Young, happy he's a conscience that rocks. Isn't it ironic that a Canadian is the one to remind us of what's best about America? The country has lost sight of itself, no matter how the Bush administration spins and obfuscates. Build a wall around it? I thought it was founded on openness, on a notion of community that includes rather than rejects. But that's another discussion.
In 1979, Neil Young wrote about artistic vitality, in Rust Never Sleeps. In 1975, he stared down death, in Tonight's the Night. He has been associated with the reactionary, in his touting of Ronald Reagan in the '80s, something I still don't understand. Above all, he has been associated with contrariness and outspokenness, and some of his best work is bulletins from Despair Central, like “Ohio,” the classic he cranked out for Crosby, Stills Nash & Young just days after the shooting of four Kent State University students by the National Guard in 1970. Young is often topical, his best music immediate.
I prefer the hard rock Neil Young to the pastoral, agrarian side exemplified in "Heart of Gold" and Old Ways. I like Young to speak truth to power. That's what he does in Living With War, perhaps his most immediate release ever.
Recorded in 20 days, in the distribution pipeline and into record stores in another 20, Living With War is Young's update of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, a landmark 1970 release that summed up the zeitgeist of the times, too. Here, Young grapples with ecology in “After the Garden”; scolds all us materialists in “The Restless Consumer,” the third track and the one in which the album finds its groove; calls the empty, toxic rhetoric of the Bush administration to account in “Shock and Awe,” a fierce slab of metal chamber music; connects the Vietnam and Iraq quagmires in the wan and wistful “Roger and Out”; and nails Dubya in “Let's Impeach the President,” a bitter and long-overdue suggestion that Young's in a better — and politically safer — position to make than Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold.
Article comments
1 - Barry Stoller
It's an easy rebellion to protest Bush and the war now that Bush's public rating is in free-fall; where was Young's "conscience" before the election? Releasing this sort of thing when Bush's ratings were still high - now, that would have been something. As it stands, this is another safe pop commodity by another predictable pop star.
2 - Connie Phillips
This article has been placed at the Advance.net websites, a site affiliated with about 12 newspapers.
One such site is here.
3 - adam R todd
People act like neil young JUST started talking this way. Greendale was the first time he spoke his feelings about the current government.
4 - joboo
heavy on conviction and heart but young's fiery condemantion of bush's america--while entirely justified--suffers from a bewildering paucity of craft and art. I'm glad Neil is burning with the need to say something; i just wish he said with a bit more substance.