NEW: First review of Neil Young's protest album "Living With War"
Wed Apr 19, 2006 at 08:56:09 PM PDT
Howie Klein (not to be confused with Howie Kurtz) is the former president of Reprise Records, now blogging at
Down With Tyranny. He recently heard a preview of Neil Young's soon-to-be-released epic protest album, "Living With War," which I previously wrote about
here. (It was, incidentally, my first diary after years of visiting the site, and thanks to all who commented and recommended.)
The remainder of this diary will consist of large excerpts of Klein's review, which I suggest clicking to and reading in full.
In short, Klein thinks that "Living With War" is a lyrical and musical masterpiece.
After some preliminary context, Klein summarizes the lyrical power behind Neil's despair with the Bush Administration:
The specifics of the songs Neil has recorded and the points he raises lyrically should come as no surprise-- not even to people whose consciousnesses have been enveloped in a powerful and mind-numbing haze for the last few years. Conventional wisdom has pretty much made it clear that Bush and his regime are incompetent, venal and corrupt and that his war is one of the most catastrophic foreign policy blunders every made by a U.S. president. What Neil has done with LIVING WITH WAR is made these idess easily digestible for post-literate western society at large. He's managed to create a body of work that will help make it easy for people to talk about the war, Bush's short-comings and how to deal with them.
Klein then observes that Neil's album doesn't consist of a long, raging, end-of-the-world jeremiad:
The first track is called "After the Garden" and, obviously, its first lines are the first lines of the album:
Won't need no shadow man
Runnin' the government
A nice optimistic beginning for a collection of songs that could have been a big downer. Neil chose a different road though-- one that is inspiring and positive, both musically and lyrically.
As a guy who's long resisted the pull of consumerism and commercialization (remember "This Note's For You," but his Greendale album also had a strong anti-consumerism thread) Neil links desensitization to war with Madison Avenue:
The next song starts out dark and ominous, "The Restless Consumer," a song as destined to be called "Don't Need No More Lies," as Green Day's classic "Good Riddance" is always called "Time Of Your Life." This is a heavy song that weaves together several threads which have shown up in Neil's work for many years. Just from my one listen I took from it an anger at the power of "Madison Avenue" to create absurd demands-- from needless consumerism to... needless wars. The song questions how a society-- ours-- sets priorities. Why wars instead of curing diseases, for example? This'll be a good one for college professors to discuss with their students for decades to come.
Next, a song called "Shock and Awe":
"Shock And Awe" is the fourth song on the record. Neil doesn't have planes and tanks and bombs. He has words and, ultimately, his "Shock and Awe" will be long remembered after Bush and his shock and awe are nothing but an unfortunate footnote in history books.
Back in the days of shock and awe
We came to liberate them all
History was the cruel judge of overconfidence
Back in the days of shock and awe.
Thousands of children scarred for life
Millions of tears for a soldier's wife
Both sides are losing now...
And although Klein is straightforward about not only his political but musical biases, he thinks that this album is one of Neil's greatest:
I remember thinking that right around this point in my listening experience, and especially with the next song, "Families," came the realization that I was listening to a classic Neil album that will go down as one of his greatest. The sixth song, "Flags of Freedom," made me glad I was sitting alone so I could let me tears flow freely without embarrassing myself or anyone else. The first 2 lines give it all away: "Today is the day our younger son/Is going off to war..."
The song that's the metaphorical money shot in this album -- "Impeach the President" -- doesn't just discuss all the lies and horrors about Iraq, but is a capsule history of the last five years of life under the administration:
The next song is the one that really lays it on the line, the one all his accumulated moral authority allows him to write, the one everyone wants to know about, "Let's Impeach the President." Maybe his pal Steve Bing should send the lyrics to all the wet-finger-in-the-wind Democratic senators who refuse to back Russ Feingold's moderate censure resolution. Instinctively, Neil must have known the song is going to cause an uproar and become the focus of the album. So he crafted an absolute masterpiece, immune from the barbs and arrows that will surely come.
Let's impeach the president for lying
Misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
He then goes on to lay out a case as strong as anything Henry Waxman is going to do-- maybe not as specific-- but a lot more poetic. The song discusses the Regime's criminality, spying, the mess they made of post-Katrina New Orleans, hijacking "our religion" for partisan purposes, as well as how they have used divisiveness and racism to further their political agenda. Neil backs up his lyrics with Bush's own words, turning his inspid/Orwellian words on tape against him as the song is transformed from a hard rocker into a soaring gospel inspirational.
The rest of Klein's post includes plenty of intriguing details about other songs and themes in this album, so if you're intrigued, click through and check out the rest. Perhaps it's poor form to lean so heavily on the observations of another site, but right now, Klein's the only source we have on the content of what sounds like a momentous piece of work.
And to anticipate some of the comments from my earlier post -- believe me, I'm not under any delusions that a Neil Young album is going to change the tide of history. But that's not really the point. It appears that Neil has put together a potentially definitive account of the despair that a lot of us have learned to live with in the last few years. If the album becomes a cultural flashpoint and an opportunity to win over a few converts, all the better.
It's my understanding that the album is going to be released in the next 4-8 weeks.
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