[Mb-civic] Neil Young Lets Loose A War Cry

[Linda Hassler]

Begin forwarded message:

Date: April 26, 2006 9:31:13 PM CDT
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042606F.shtml
 
Neil Young Lets Loose a War Cry
    By Robert Everett-Green
    The Globe and Mail


    Wednesday 26 April 2006
> The world awaits Young's most powerful album in years, a disc fuelled 
> by outrage at Washington.    We met outside a bagel joint in north 
> Toronto, then drove a few blocks to a quiet street where two strangers 
> could sit in a big old Cadillac and listen to the car stereo in peace. 
> Then Robert Young slipped a CD-ROM from a plain white sleeve and gave 
> me a rare preview of the nine explosive new songs on his brother Neil 
> Young's much-anticipated album, Living With War.

    The disc was made in a hurry, recorded in three days on Neil 
Young's California ranch and another 12-hour session in a Los Angeles 
studio. I can hear the urgency in Young's singing, as if there's not a 
moment to lose when a great lie has spread over the land and only 
strong, sustained truth-telling can turn it back.

    Living With War is a fierce, comprehensive indictment of the Bush 
administration and all its failures, at home and abroad, but it doesn't 
feel like an outsider's dissent. It's the work of someone who clearly 
identifies with the core values of ordinary Middle Americans who voted 
for Bush, who sent their sons and daughters to war, and who are 
beginning to feel betrayed.

    Flags of Freedom, for example, starts like a proudly patriotic song 
from the days before the Vietnam War began to stain the self-image of 
the republic. Young depicts a parade of recruits marching off to war 
down the main street of their small town, church bells ringing and "the 
flags of freedom flying." But when the soldiers have passed, with 
parents and sisters watching, Young pointedly asks: "Have you seen the 
flags of freedom? / What colour are they now?" It would be hard to miss 
the sense of doubt and disappointment, made sharper by Young's allusion 
to a similar, more confident query at the end of The Star-Spangled 
Banner.

    The disappointment turns into rage in Let's Impeach the President. 
This long impassioned outcry begins with a trumpet flourish from the 
Last Post and ends with a 100-voice chorus shouting Young's angry 
responses to numerous clips of Bush's own words about Bin Laden, Saddam 
Hussein and the case for war in Iraq.

    "Let's impeach the president for lying / and leading our country 
into war," Young hollers, "abusing all the power that we gave him / and 
shipping all our money out the door . . . Let's impeach the president 
for spying / on citizens inside their own homes / breaking every law in 
the country / tapping our computers and telephones."

    The text alone can't convey the sense of gasping outrage in Young's 
singing, and his forceful arrangements for guitar, bass, drums and 
sometimes trumpet. His electric guitar's gnarly, saturated tone has an 
almost drunken quality, as if it too were reeling from the great 
betrayal.

    But the music throughout the album feels sparse and tightly 
controlled, as if these statements were too important to be gussied up 
with ornament. The trumpet, when it appears, does so only briefly, with 
a different character each time, evoking the sounds of a border town in 
Bush's native Texas (in Shock and Awe), or doubling the guitar melody 
like a quasi-human voice (in Living With War).

    Likewise, the choir plays several roles, and offers much more than 
backing vocals. It's the sound of the people, whether represented as a 
church congregation (in the title song) or a chanting crowd of 
protesters (in Let's Impeach the President).

    Mostly, it's a big-tent collection of ordinary citizens, which at 
the end of the album sings an a cappella version of America the 
Beautiful, recalling in a more robust key the final scene of Michael 
Cimino's devastating Vietnam film, The Deer Hunter.

    The title song makes the most powerful use of core American themes 
and symbols, and the rhetoric of the religious right. Both the melody 
and the lyrics ("I join the multitudes, I raise my hand in peace . . . 
I take a holy vow never to kill again") feel hymn-like, in spite of the 
song's rock idiom. The voices rise as Young inserts a line from The 
Star-Spangled Banner ("the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in 
air") and it seems at first as if the reference is purely ironic. But 
he goes on with another line from the anthem, and suddenly the meaning 
is more ambivalent, more complicated by a sense of bedrock patriotism.

    At bottom, this is a profoundly patriotic record. Its predominant 
theme is spoiled hopes, and the list is long, including hopes for a 
safe environment, for economic justice at home and abroad, for peace 
between nations. But a few songs make it clear that Young isn't 
finished with hoping. Looking for a Leader, which comes right after 
Let's Impeach the President, is an unvarnished call for a new authority 
figure who can right the wrong, clear out the corruption, and make the 
nation's symbols feel pure again. "Some one walks among us, and I hope 
he hears the call," Young sings, "Maybe it's a woman, or a black man 
after all."

    Young supported Reagan, and was one of the first major rock 
musicians to lend support to the so-called war on terror, in his 2001 
song Let's Roll. It would seem to be a challenge for Bush's allies to 
brush off his attacks on "the shadow man running the government." But 
the struggle is already skewed in their favour, because most of these 
songs probably won't make it on to American radio, which is heavily 
dominated by the ClearChannel empire. Those are the folks, you may 
remember, who yanked the Dixie Chicks from the airwaves after Natalie 
Maines dared to criticize the President in front of a microphone.

    Young knows all about that, which is why this album will be 
streamed for free on his website (http://www.neilyoung.com) for a week 
starting Friday, before a commercial release on Reprise/Warner. It's 
going to spread on-line, and on college radio, and by word of mouth. 
It's a media virus, and it's also Young's strongest record in years.



    Angry Young Man

    Sample lyrics from Neil Young's upcominga album, Living With War:

    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
    Back in the days of "mission accomplished"
    Our chief was landing on the deck
    The sun was setting on a golden photo-op
    Back in the days of "mission accomplished"
    - from Shock and Awe

    Don't need no Madison Avenue War
    Don't need no more boxes I can't see
    Covered in flags but I can't see them on TV
    Don't need no more lies
    - from The Restless Consumer

    Won't need no shadow man
    Runnin' the government
    Won't need no stinkin' WAR
    Won't need no haircut
    Won't need no shoeshine
    After the garden is gone
    - from After the Garden

    Lookin' for a leader
    To bring our country home
    Reunite the red white and blue
    Before it turns to stone . . .
    Yeah maybe it's Obama
    But he thinks that he's too young
    Maybe it's Colin Powell
    To right what he's done wrong
    - from Lookin' for a Leader