Far out! Neil Young is back with his raw, edgy style and songs with real words, like in the old days of music when I was a kid growing up.
Anyone who knew me in my younger days knew there was only one thing to know about me. By age 14 I was completely glued to Neil Young. I still keep his albums cherished and guarded, played thin during my tormentful teens and free spirited twenties.
When he went Farm-Aid, I lost interest. It was the last straw after "Rust Never Sleeps", which was my first sign he was fading away into some weird place I couldn't follow or relate to. He began going country. He began to sound the same.
But, I never lost my love for the high pitched whiney musical poet who wrote songs I could usually remember. I could sing along and have fun doing it. I always wondered why he sang about Cortez The Killer and wondered whatever happened to his film, Journey Through The Past. He always had this way of getting to me, and when I was an angry kid growing up in the late 60's and through the 70's, he was my rock. He was the parent who got through to me, when I couldn't stand mine. He fed my radical self and all my friends knew it.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
As an oldster in this new age, my head filled with memories of Kent State (Neil sang, "4 dead in Ohio") and Vietnam, I've wondered why the pictures that I saw while growing up, inside old large-paged Life magazines, are repeated today in Newsweek and Time. Same images. Different wars. Why is nobody saying "no" to the pathetic antics coming from Washington - by both parties? There are whispers of complaints from the American public, but no Movement.
What's missing from today's youth culture?
I see bold vibrant colors coming back in their clothing, and long hair returning to kids my daughter's age. Bare butts hang out of jeans again. Girls are wearing fringe, halter tops and mini skirts just as I once did. My kids and their friends look like I did 30 years ago, but they don't have any idea what's going on in the world. They can't know the truth because MTV is hiding it from them, marketers are avoiding anything human and video games make killing easy, familiar. Painless.
Neil Young has released new music and its all about living with War. It can be heard online, for free, by going to Living With War.
"This record is both a throwback and the future. Young is going to make the songs available to listen to for free. Reuters reports that "starting April 28, fans can log onto Young's Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and listen to the 10-track collection in its entirety, free of charge, said Bill Bentley, a spokesman for Warner Music Group's Reprise Records." And Neil Young has both feet planted firmly in the future, bypassing the slower (and more expensive) traditional forms of promotion and going directly to the Internet to reach his audience. The message he has is so urgent that there is not a moment to waste, and the immediacy of the Internet is the perfect conduit."
According to the NEIL YOUNG - Living With War blog, you can listen to the whole album online, now. (They keep calling it an album. Whenever I use that word at home, my kids stop me with "Mom, we don't have them anymore.")
I'm sure many of you are completely lost about how Neil's singing in protest again is anything special. That's okay. He represents a time when we sang in groups and harmonized. Our jeans had holes in the knees because we wore them out, rather them paid $50 for somebody to manufacture them that way. We grew our hair long, rather than buying extensions to hurry things along. We created Woodstock from an energy-soul source that has never returned again to this planet. I wrote the most depressing poetry. I hated the establishment and never in a million years believed I would live long enough to become one of them.
Now that I am, I'm going to say this just once. There is a reason I call myself "Cre8pc" (Create Peace).
It used to matter a lot to some of us.
"I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up," Young said. "I waited a long time. Then, I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the '60s generation. We're still here." -- Neil Young
:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 4/28/2006 10:05:00 PM
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