Neil Young - Living with War
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Neil YoungBrand: YOUNG,NEIL
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2006-05-08
Music Label: Reprise Records
Product features:
- YOUNG NEIL LIVING WITH WAR
- After the Garden
- Living With War
- The Restless Consumer
- Shock and Awe
- Families
- Flags of Freedom
- Let's Impeach the President
- Lookin' for a Leader
- Roger and Out
- America the Beautiful
Free Music Notes for Living with War
Free Music Review: Rocking and catchy anti-war anthems
Hit: 5 Stars
Few rock and rollers really take advantage of their fame to promote peace or left-wing values. We associate rock music with rebellion, but who's really speaking out? Long hair and drug use is not true rebellion. The hairlines recede and the drugs were for losers. True rebellion is Neil Young producing an album called Living with War, recording it overnight and making it available on the Internet without charge.
I think about John Lennon lying in bed in 1969 with Yoko Ono to promote peace. Hairy John under the covers with his granny glasses, looking 40 years older than Beatle John who sang "She Loves You" on the Ed Sullivan Show only 5 years earlier. The "bed in" was a ludicrous stunt, but it was John Lennon, and that got the word "peace" in the newspaper the next day.
The late 1960's were a political time, with war in Vietnam killing thousands of young men and tearing the country apart. But few rock stars spoke out. The Beatles actually spoke out against Vietnam in 1966, when people thought they were still mop-tops. But then they immediately dove into psychedelia. Bob Dylan, of course, sang protest songs, but when he plugged in his guitar and became a rocker, the protest songs stopped and he began singing about love and all that crap, for the most part. It was great stuff, but it wasn't protest music. Frank Zappa recorded the most biting satire in rock history in the late 1960's, but he was too obscure for public consumption. Lennon did sing about revolution in 1968, but he couldn't decide whether he supported or opposed violence.
On May 4, 1970, President Nixon's goon squad opened fire on anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. Kent State may be a good school, but it will forever be remembered for that horrible photograph of an anguished young woman leaning over the body of her dead friend. The protesters did nothing wrong that day, and the event symbolized an era.
When the students were killed at Kent State, Neil Young, who'd been hanging around Crosby, Stills and Nash, wrote " Ohio." We've heard this song so many times that we've forgotten what it means and how powerful it must have sounded in 1970, right after the shootings.
Living with War was recorded quickly, only a few weeks ago. Some of the songs on this album really smoke. Classic Neil Young: songs that revolve around the same three or four chords he's been strumming for nearly 40 years. Snobby rock critics make fun of rockers who write three chord songs, but the greatest folk songs were three chords used in different sequence with different rhythms so that listeners are not even aware that the same three chords are being used. And if the song is good, who cares? Young is the master of three chord rock, distorting the amplifier and finding a dutiful drummer to pound the hell out of the instrument to drive the point home.
The lyrics on Living with War are not cryptic. Bruce Springsteen learned in 1984 that cryptic rock lyrics are prone to dramatic misunderstanding. His "Born in the USA" was about a Vietnam veteran's misery in the homeland, but Ronald Reagan appropriated the song as his own and, frankly, too many of my contemporaries thought the song was an ode to blind patriotism. It wasn't.
Neil Young was never subtle. A string of great albums in the 1970's led to experiments in the 1980's that we'd rather forget. He didn't care. Neil did an album of electronic music in 1982 called Trans which recycled (and butchered) a classic from his days with Buffalo Springfield, one of the great folk-rock groups of the 1960's. He did a 1950's throwback album in the mid-1980's. Reviewing the album, Creem magazine summed it up: "It sucks, plain and simple." But he found his muse again a few years later with "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World," which sounded hokey at the time but throws in a few jabs at the first President Bush.
What stands out for me is that in the late 1970's many of Young's contemporaries were burning out or running out of ideas. Not Neil, who shocked us with Rust Never Sleeps, a five star album. Rust Never Sleeps was loud and brash and his voice was in fine form. But the quieter songs were sweet and melodic. His songwriting style is recognizable, and so is his guitar playing -- grungy and loud with solos that scream without showing off. The way we love it.
Sometime in the 1980's, Neil commended President Reagan, much to my chagrin. Somewhere along the way, he found his way back. I doubt he's changing his mind anytime soon.
The album is available online without charge but you have to hear the whole thing at once and not pick and choose the songs. As Neil told the New York Times, "That first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it."
A few notes on the songs: "Shock and Awe" says that "we had a chance to change our mind. . . . We went with what we knew, and now we can't go back." This of course refers to the 2004 election. If this song does not get you excited, nothing will. The drummer sounds even angrier than Neil Young. The lyrics are stark, howling about dead bodies, crying widows and "thousands of children scarred for life." A trumpet replicates the guitar solo, probably because Neil's fingers were bleeding from his toughest and loudest guitar work. I'll say it now: "Shock and Awe" may be one of the greatest protest songs in rock history.
"Families" is another three chord grunger which sounds a lot like Springsteen's wonderful "No Surrender" from the Born in the USA album, a chord sequence that I can hear anytime. Here's what he told Rolling Stone about the song and why he recorded the album: "We were in a small hotel and I had already written four songs and was playing them in the room. I knew I was getting sucked in. I went down to the coffee machine and there was USA TODAY, the cover showed the inside of a C130 or similar large military craft, completely converted into a flying hospital. Soldiers were lying on operating tables, with physicians furiously trying to save lives at 100s of miles an hour some 20,000 feet in the air. The plane was a shuttle between Iraq and Germany, where we have these big bases and hospitals. The USA TODAY caption said something about how we are making great strides in medicine as a result of the Iraq conflict. That just caught me off guard, and I went upstairs and wrote "Families" for one of those soldiers who didn't get to come home. Then I cried in my wife's arms. That was the turning point for me."
"Let's Impeach the President" speaks for itself. A choir led by Neil Young sings the beautiful "Living with War." The finale, "America the Beautiful," is the song you're thinking of, also sung by a choir.
When I was younger I could not imagine how the rockers of the 1960's and 1970's could grow old gracefully. We thought rock was the music of the young and that men in their 50's or 60's couldn't do it any better than baseball players could play into their 50's and 60's. But Neil Young proves that notion wrong once and for all, if any further proof were needed. This album is rejuvenating and vital. As far as I'm concerned, Neil Young wins the Most Valuable Player award.
Living with War Poster
The Canadian music hall of famer and former member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is responsible for hits like Southern Man, Heart of Gold and Harvest Moon. But on his newest record, to be titled Living with the War, Young is taking a page from Bob Dylan and putting together an album of protest songs against the actions of American President George W. Bush. One of the tracks on the upcoming release, which as of yet has no release date, is said to feature the single Let?s Impeach the President whose subject is fairly obvious. Not a stranger to protest music the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tune Ohio was written in reaction to a protest against the Vietnam War.Classic Rock Music CDs
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