Living With War

  The release of Neil Young’s war-protest album, “Living With War,” is old news.  It hit shelves in early May and was received with mixed—and clearly partisan—reviews.  Conservatives and hawks hated it; liberals and doves loved it.  My beef with the album has little to do with the political ideals that produced it.  I think that is lyrically inferior to Young’s earlier work, including last year’s “Prairie Wind,” and musically it appears to be driven by the frustration of “living with war.”  Although I suspect there is more to that frustration.

  Earlier this week, as the nation was celebrating its 230^th birthday, Neil Young’s website opened its doors to a new feature, “Living With War Today.”  The mock newspaper, its motto “All War All The Time,” includes both positive and negative reviews of the album, under the headline “The Great Debate.”  It presents stats on monthly U.S. deaths in Iraq, and total U.S. military deaths in Iraq.  There is a “Timeline Analyzer, developed exclusively for LWWToday,” that tracks coverage of the album on television, radio, and print media alongside events relating to the production of the album.  But perhaps the most telling feature on the site is a section where both aspiring and established artists can submit protest songs and videos for possible inclusion.

  Now back to that frustration that is evident in Young’s guitar playing on “Living With War.”  The timing of the album’s release seemed odd.  It was rushed, as one reviewer said, “like a breaking news bulletin.”  It was written and recorded in less than two weeks.  On April 28, the album began streaming on Internet sites; on May 2, it became available as an internet-only download; on May 8, it hit shelves.  Young’s label, Reprise, fast-tracked it without the usual buck-and-shuffle of pre-release promotion, pitching singles to radio, buying ads in the trade.  Only five weeks passed between the first recording session and the first in-store purchase, entirely unheard-of in the world of record production.  But why the urgency?

  Nothing in particular—no catastrophic world event, no sudden change in approval ratings—happened to precipitate the hastening of the album’s release.  Young, it seemed, was just fed up.  The voice of protest and Young’s are the same, inextricably intertwined for almost 40 years.  It was Young’s voice on Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” a song that, in 1967, announced the arrival of a new generation of protest songs.  The torch had been passed from the folkies, like Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire, to the next generation of rockers.  A few years later, Young penned “Ohio,” which became an anthem of the student anti-war protest.

  The urgency and frustration that can be heard on “Living With War” is, in no small part, Young reaching his tipping point.  Where is the next generation?  To whom can we pass the torch?  And why must a 61-year-old Canadian—recovering from brain aneurysms, no less—be the one to pen these songs?  Young has said that he kept waiting for younger singer-songwriters to begin writing these songs, voicing the frustrations of a generation of Americans upset by the war. 

  The clatter that can be heard between notes on “Living With War” is the sound of Neil Young throwing down the gauntlet.

  See Living With War Today at www.neilyoung.com.

 -From Pulse
   July 6, 2006