Neil Young’s Culture War
Over 170 years after Emerson warned that “travelling is a fool’s paradise,” Americans still maintain a love for the open road. Manifest destiny, the idea that we can spread out as far as we wish (into supposedly uninhabited lands), persisted long after the close of the frontier in the 1890’s. In the 1960’s there was the “final frontier” of space, and in this millennium, we have created new frontiers in the infinite digital world. But some people never left the freeway. Neil Young, the 66-year-old self-proclaimed “hippie [with] too much money,” longs for an anachronistic America full of roads and empty of excessive settlement, an America of folk culture and old friends who never fade away.
Young’s latest project, an hour-and-a-half long double-album entitled Psychedelic Pill, recorded with his frequent collaborators Crazy Horse, can hardly be called ambitious. Young has little risk of popular failure at this point, having reached an age and a position when criticisms of his work are deemed disrespectful if not heretical. Nevertheless, Young’s newest piece has all the quality control of a roadside Denny’s. Masterpieces are separated by some of the worst cuts of Young’s storied career; tired lyrics interrupt terrifically imaginative jams.
From the beginning, Psychedelic Pill bemoans contemporary culture and prescribes nostalgia as its antidote. In “I’m Drifting Back,” the album’s first song, Young worries that people can no longer hear him because of the “way things sound now.” For those of us following Young’s extracurricular activities, this lament points to his supposedly revolutionary PONO recording technology, the idea for which Young developed because he hated the muddled sound clarity of MP3s. To the casual listener though, Young’s whine seems to castigate popular music, in which machines have quite literally taken over and the human voice cannot be heard beneath the din.
Machines have taken over other forms of art too, much to Young’s chagrin. In “I’m Drifting Back” he wails, “I used to dig Picasso / Then the big tech giant came along / And turned him into wallpaper.” While less innovatively expressed than Warhol or Lichtenstein, Young’s bitterness at the commercialization of art, especially art formerly deemed subversive, has particular resonance coming from him. Never one to appear in commercials, Young has disgustedly endured the best of his generation selling out to corporate interests: Led Zeppelin to Cadillac, the Rolling Stones to Coca-Cola, and, bizarrely, Bob Dylan to Victoria’s Secret. More exasperated as the song continues, Young eventually (jokingly, we assume) gives in to popular pressure: “Gonna get me a hip-hop haircut” he promises, sarcastically lampooning aging stars who will do anything they can to stay relevant.
The third track on the album, “Ramada Inn,” changes tone completely. In a 17-minute melancholic jam with lyrics sung almost in an undertone, Young manages to create an atmosphere as wistful and broken as in his 1975 masterpiece “Cortez the Killer.” “Ramada Inn” paints a portrait of an aging couple whose children have moved out of the house and whose marriage suffers under the weight of the husband’s alcoholism. “He loves her so/ He does what he needs to,” Young tries to reassure, straining his voice as if to plead with the marriage gods to keep the two together. Husband and wife take a road trip, believing as Young does that the open road will heal what ails them. They head south, hoping to see old friends in San Jose. The region holds special significance for Young, having lived on Broken Arrow Ranch just outside of San Jose for decades. Unbeknownst to the husband, his wife has a hidden motive for taking the trip. She encourages him to talk to the old friends about their own struggles with alcoholism, hoping that this might be the encouragement he needs to end his addiction. But “he just pours himself another tall one” and the wedge between them widens. They “hold on to what they’ve done” in order to stay together, but the pain persists.
The music video for “Ramada Inn” narrates the tragedy of the marriage through the use of stock footage from the 1950s, featuring shots of a starched-collar husband and kitchen apron wife interspersed with video of a journey filmed through a car windshield from the same era. Towards the end of the song, contemporary driving scenes shot on the same road and in the same style alternate with the ‘50s images. The message is clear: problems don’t go away over generations, and the open road still entices the troubled to escape.
Young still perceives the American West as a vast expanse, a land for the lonely where his mammoth compositions have space to stretch their legs. Later in the album he conjures up a place of the “ocean wave” and “billowing sky” where he can wander and wonder. He wants to “walk like a giant on the land,” a line that evokes the image of Neil’ Armstrong’s colossal boots making their first imprints on the moon, another Neil who symbolizes America’s continued love affair with pioneerism.
But much of that free spirit has been lost, Young laments. On the most poorly written track of the album, “Twisted Road,” Young recounts the first time he heard the Grateful Dead and “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. These musicians and other members of their generation could have changed the world, Young reminds us in “Walk Like a Giant.” “We were pulling in the spiritual/ Riding on the desert wind/ We could see it in the distance / Getting closer every minute.” Revolutionary crusaders on a limitless desert plain: Young conflates the cultural battles of the ‘60s and ‘70s with the imagery of the righteous cowboys in The Magnificent Seven.
Typical of nostalgia-addicts, Young distorts both his and his generation’s impact on American society. The last epoch-defining song Young wrote was “Ohio” in 1970. He went on to create magnificent, influential works- but not in the counter-cultural, political dissident form of his Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young days. To his credit, Young has never been a two-bit topical songwriter. The reason so few people still listen to Phil Ochs or Joan Baez today is because their songs exclusively reflected another era’s struggles that have little relevance in contemporary culture. Young may decry the lack of political activism in music, but listeners still gravitate toward his older work (Zuma, Harvest, Everybody Knows this is Nowhere) because it addresses universal themes. Those listening to “Ohio” do so because of its catchy riffs and intriguing historical context, not because of its subversive potential.
And Young’s own love of the open road deserves to be scrutinized as well. In the introduction to his recently released memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, Young bluntly reveals the main motivation for its publication: he wants to earn enough money to stay off the road for a while. Bob Dylan has been on his “Never Ending Tour” since 1988, playing small theaters, minor league baseball stadiums, and little-known festivals around 100 times a year. Young, by contrast, performs no more than a few dozen dates per year and tries to maximize his earnings by playing large venues and swarmed festivals. While certainly within his rights as a performer, this strategy does somewhat undermine Young’s desired vagabond image. At this point, it should also be noted that the US is Young’s adopted homeland, as the song “Born in Ontario” helpfully reminds us.
However, it would be foolish to discount Young’s songs because of inconsistencies in his personal practice. At his best, Young is the musical equivalent of Cormac McCarthy, the El Paso-based Pulitzer-winning novelist of the American West. The frontier has remained a crucial part of the American imagination because of a national narrative of exceptionalism. The pioneer, the explorer, the ‘49er–all are headstrong, innovative, risk-taking personages of American adventurers. They prove the human ability to create our own worlds in harsh conditions. The pioneer is lonely but steadfast, witty but stoic. The myth sells. Americans in squeaky-clean suburbs and anesthetized cities want to imagine themselves as part of a glorious enterprise, a human experiment unparalleled in history, particularly at a time when American culture seems sedate and un-revolutionary. So they read Cormac McCarthy and listen to Neil Young, hoping to get lost in their fictionalized desolate landscapes of a revisionist past. They don’t fear the unknown- they’re Americans. They’ll conquer it somehow.