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Neil Young
Living with War
(Reprise)
The Music Box's #8 album of 2006
First Appeared in The Music Box, June 2006, Volume 13, #6
Written by John Metzger
Neil Young is no stranger to penning protest songs, but unlike many of his
peers, his political affiliation isn’t easy to pigeonhole. On Ohio, he
slammed Richard Nixon for the 1970 massacre of student protestors by National
Guardsmen at Kent State, yet by the time that Campaigner was issued seven
years later, he seemed to find empathy for the former U.S. leader. He also
publicly criticized Jimmy Carter, ushered in the Reagan era with the flag-waving
Hawks & Doves, supported the tenets behind the Patriot Act, and responded
to the 9/11 attacks with Let’s Roll, an homage to the passengers on
United Flight 93. On the other hand, he devoted a large portion of his life to
saving family farms from financial ruin at the hands of large corporations, and
he protested the Gulf War during his Arc/Weld tour by shredding in
Hendrix-ian fashion Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind while standing in
front of a tie-dyed backdrop of a peace sign.
Although, at first glance, Young’s ideals appear to be little more than a
stream of scattered reactionary retorts, a closer examination of his canon —
from After the Gold Rush to Rust Never Sleeps, from On the
Beach to Are You Passionate?, and from This Note’s for You to
Greendale — reveals a series of recurring themes that not only bind
together the totality of his work but also crystallize his beliefs into a
coherent vision that is well-suited to that bastion of red-statehood: Middle
America. Throughout Young’s career, neither his patriotism nor his spiritual
convictions have ever wavered, and he holds hard-working Americans as well as
their families in high regard, while downright despising those who abuse the
power and the privileges that are granted to them. In that sense, his latest
outing Living with War fits neatly within the framework of his back
catalogue, and considering that he can’t be dismissed quite so readily as one of
Move On’s leftist disciples, it ought to scare the bejesus out of a Washington
establishment whose popularity ratings have gone seriously sour in recent
months.
For certain, there’s no mistaking Young’s fury, and the brute force with
which Living with War’s material is delivered perfectly complements the
raw emotional content of his lyrics. Written and recorded over the course of two
weeks and ushered to market in less than a month, the angst-filled album boasts
a bare bones band that pits Young’s frazzled, electric guitar snarls against a
stampede of drums and bass, all of which is colored by a mariachi trumpet and
uplifted by a 100-strong gospel choir that is meant to symbolize the rising
voices of American citizens. Throughout the endeavor, Young borrows from Bob
Dylan — most directly, Flags of Freedom is drawn from Chimes of
Freedom, while Roger and Out hints at Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
— and he meditates upon Rockin’ in the Free World by sculpting from the
song his own thousand points of light, each of which is meant to illuminate the
many failings of the latest Bush presidency.
Where T Bone Burnett, on his recently issued set The True False Identity,
took a more cerebral approach to socio-political commentary by burying his
poetic ruminations within a series of arty textures, Young delivers his thoughts
on Living with War in a decidedly more straightforward fashion.
Significantly upping the ante, he ditched the lyrical complexities of his
theater piece Greendale and replaced them with a ferociously direct
indictment of the Republican leadership’s failed policies. "Won’t need no shadow
man/Runnin’ the government/Won’t need no stinkin’ war," he sings with contempt
on the opening track After the Garden. Later, on the aptly titled
Let’s Impeach the President, he lambastes George W. Bush and then
intersperses soundbites from America’s Commander-in-Chief with
the chanted words "flip" and "flop" in a manner that would make Daily Show
host Jon Stewart proud. In fact, by the time that the album has concluded, Young
angrily has taken Bush to task not just over the war in Iraq, but also for his
fiscal irresponsibility, his post-9/11 blundering, his scandalous handling of
the Hurricane Katrina disaster, his various infringements upon civil liberties,
and the environmental devastation that he has wrought to the benefit of massive,
global corporations.
There’s no question that Living with War is a product of the
environment in which it was born, and the specificity of many of Young’s
statements likely will reduce its life span significantly. Nevertheless, there’s
an urgency to the album that has been strikingly absent from rock music for
several decades and buried within the affair are several tracks that not only
serve to innoculate him from the usual right-wing charges of "blaming America
first" but also grant the collection a more timeless resonance. For example, he
tucks the gospel-hued holiness of The Star-Spangled Banner into the title
track, concludes the set with a solemn interpretation of America the
Beautiful, and demonstrates his support for the troops by touchingly
empathizing with them and their loved ones on Families, Flags of
Freedom, and Roger and Out.
Although the fact that Young isn’t an American citizen is bound to draw
criticism from those seeking to deflect attention from the problems at hand,
it’s also true that he has resided in the U.S.A. for 40 years while raising a
family and contributing significantly to the nation’s infrastructure. In other
words, he’s an immigrant just like everyone else in the country, one who has
learned to love the place that he calls home despite its flaws. On Living
with War, Young essentially caps a trilogy of song cycles that have found
him shifting from thoughtfully asking the electorate "Are you passionate?" to
fervently portraying in all its ragged glory his visceral reaction to what has
become of the post-9/11 world, and this time, he seems to have everyone’s
attention. 
Living with War is available from Amazon.com.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2006 The Music Box
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