Neil Young

Living with War

We thought it would be unfair to simply publish one review of Neil Young's 'Living With War'. Thus, in the spirit of balance and bipartisan cooperation, we decided to publish two.

Living With War
by James Ketchell

This album has already received plenty of coverage on the internet and in the mainstream media. Even before its release it had received more coverage than any other Neil Young record in years. Indeed, the album has probably received more coverage than any other record this year. The reason: Neil Young tells it like it is and slams George W. Bush (I think it stands for "wanker", but I am not sure).

This enigmatic talisman who only recently recovered from a brain haemorrhage and has just released a CD and film set entitled Prairie Wind surprised everyone with this outburst. I watched Neil Young appear on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (an American political comedy show) at the time of Prairie Wind. Perhaps this was the inspiration? Who knows, this is only pure speculation, but whatever the inspiration, Neil Young has produced an all-out scathing attack on the Bush administration.

It has come as no surprise to many but delving deeper into his career reveals a mixed political stance. His first "protest" song, ‘Ohio' came well into his career, he has publicly stated his support for some of Ronald Reagan's policies and stated some things which can only be described as homophobic. He has always been branded a protest singer despite holding these questionable beliefs. But one thing that is for sure is that ‘Living with War' is Neil Young's most political statement ever.

Yes I used the term statement as this is not a traditional album. It should not be reviewed as such. The songs are all valid as present day statements, they will hold no sway in ten, fifteen months time. This is why Neil Young has been so busy trying to get the album out now, with internet streaming, downloads and the physical release being rushed through. All in all it has taken three weeks for the album to go from conception to shop front.

There is nothing subtle about this album, the urgency that is demonstrated in getting the message across through almost instantaneous internet access to the songs, also manifests itself in the record. Songs like ‘Let's Impeach the President' and ‘Shock and Awe' are straight, down the line statements for action. ‘Let's Impeach the President' attacks George Bush for leading the country to war, spying on American citizens and racial division in the states and is representative of the kind of lyrics and themes present on the rest of the record:

"Let's impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door"

Looking at the album musically, Neil Young splices electric "folk-metal" guitar (his words) with a choir. However, some of the songs seem bereft of original musical inspiration; ‘Flags of Freedom' steals the tune of Dylan's ‘Chimes of Freedom'. Many will see the choir as an extravagance and at times it feels as if Young is unsure of what to do with them, but one listen to the final track (an amazing rendition of ‘America the Beautiful') is enough to make the point that they are a necessity on this album. Overall, musically it holds up well, but it feels as if the urgency of Neil Young's message has meant that many songs are rushed and not properly thought through. I get the impression that there is a masterpiece in there somewhere, Neil just needed to take a little more time.

Ultimately my point of view and your point of view are irrelevant here. This not a musical but a political statement. Neil Young has succeeded in rallying the ‘left' (where the Boss, REM and Fogerty were unable to do so with their "concerts for change" prior to the presidential elections) and has already generated thousands of words of interest and discussion around the topic. The attack is even more surprising in that it came out of nowhere. The urgency of the moment has created a record with strong political views but one which with a little more time and patience could have been a political and musical masterpiece. Having said all of this, there is quite simply no other record like this (either lyrically or musically), and this in itself is a reason to listen to it.

Living With War
by Kevin Davis

Neil, you rascal! You were just made for these times, weren't you? Controversy, political awareness, machines against which to rage, and don't even get me started on those flags of freedom flying! Who cares if the protest song is almost a cliché by design? When you're pissed, you're pissed, and if you're gonna make a statement, you might as well make it as stark as possible, right? I mean, there's not much point in ambiguity when your point is simply "let's impeach the president"; hell, you could just go ahead use that as one of the song titles, then they'll really get the drift!

Living With War is Neil Young's fifth album of the new millennium, and while it is neither the best nor the worst of this batch of records, it is the first to revisit rock and roll as we know it to have been told by Shakey. Politics aside, Living With War rocks with an in-the-garage urgency that we haven't seen since Ragged Glory. Rumor has it that he wrote it and recorded it in three days, and if that wasn't remarkable enough, there was barely a two-week turnaround period before the entire thing was streaming ferociously across his website. The man's dedication to his art is nothing if not admirable; it's obvious that this is something Neil truly cares about, something he wants heard as soon as possible and by whatever means necessary, and the blending of this share-the-music approach with the let's-impeach-the-president subject matter and the garage-band ruggedness of the recording makes this quite possibly Neil Young's most punk rock album ever (save for maybe Everybody's Rockin' - there was a middle finger to the industry if ever there was one).

For those like your reviewer who thought Greendale and Prairie Wind were both piles of manure, you can rest easy, because this album has the one thing that those albums were missing: melody. Neil has been about a lot of things throughout his career, but the common thread that runs through all his best work is his remarkable ability to compose tunes that are beautifully and enlighteningly simple, but that no one other than Neil Young could ever have come up with. And if none of the tunes on Living With War quite recapture the melodic heart of tunes like "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Ohio," there are at least a few that are fit to stand proudly alongside latter-day rockers like "Country Home" and "I'm the Ocean." The title track has a melody that wraps around itself in such a manner that makes the lyrics remarkable in a way that they haven't been since "Distant Camera." On "Flags of Freedom," Young reconfigures the tune to Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" to describe the departure of a hometown soldier, even giving Dylan a not-so-subtle name check about halfway through. And album opener "After the Garden" shines with the cocaine-fueled good-times of the 1970's.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much where the good news ends. In the end, a protest album is a protest album is a protest album, and regardless of how poignant the subject matter, there are few songs on this record that come across as anything more than calculated and predictable Bush-bashing. A song like "Let's Impeach the President" is novel in the same way that a song like "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw" is novel; we've become so used to thesaurus-equipped lyricists trying to artfully present material in a way that respects both the listener and the subject matter that the idea of addressing anything in such a blunt manner is, by its very nature, hilarious. And while I'd hardly presume to reside inside the mind of the artist, I don't think a good-timey laugh riot was Neil's objective here.

Sillier yet is "The Restless Consumer," which finds Neil railing against mass media in the crankiest lyrical onslaught since, well, "Grandpa's Interview" on Greendale. Of all my favorite musicians now old enough to receive the senior citizen's breakfast deal at IHOP, Neil Young is the only one who actually sounds like that old guy who sits on his porch and yells at the neighborhood kids to stay off his grass, so when he vents that he "don't need no TV ad tellin' me how sick I am," and that he, "don't need no side effects like diarrhea or sexual death," while your first inclination may be to laugh, a quick second is to turn around and ask, "Neil, are you sure about that?"

"Lookin' for a Leader" treads more familiar ground, suggesting that perhaps the real person destined to "reunite the red, white, and blue" is a woman, or maybe even a black man ("Maybe it's Obama/But he thinks that he's too young/Maybe it's Colin Powell/To right what he's done wrong"). Neil's urgent commitment to the lyrics give them a sort of brooding quality, but the pedestrian writing makes such a commitment almost humorous. When he name checked Chris Rock on Prairie Wind, there was something affecting about the contrast between a foul-mouthed, gravelly-voiced comedian and the verse's solemn subject matter; here, these references just sound like cheap propaganda. "Let's Impeach the President" in particular is full of contrived Dubya sound bytes which will make it about as durable as those post-9/11 radio mash-ups that pitted U2's "Peace on Earth" against a recording of Tex's "We will not tire, we will not falter..." speech.

It's unfortunate that Neil Young is not a strong enough lyricist to make this music timeless. By their nature, topical songs often come with an expiration date, but the best ones are designed so that, even when their number is up, the manner in which they're written allows them to resonate far beyond the lifespan of the issues they address. Songs like Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and even Young's own "Ohio," despite tackling very time-specific subjects, resound years after the fact because they're written to be good stories on their own terms, not just rants against the current powers that be. Living With War is rife with excellent points, valid observations, and astute criticisms, but its ultimate failing is that you hear it once and get the point. Perhaps that's all Neil wanted out of it (which isn't a bad payoff for having made the whole thing in seventy-two hours), but what we've got here is a period piece. What will it mean in ten years? I suppose it doesn't really matter. For now, let it rock.

James Ketchell & Kevin Davis

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