Now that President George W. Bush’s approval
ratings are stagnating around 30 percent, protest songs are fashionable
again, with everyone from Pink to Pearl Jam clamoring to kick ol’
Dubya while he’s down. Sure, indie rockers such as Jay Farrar and
Conor Oberst had already been there and done that, but big whoop: Most of
their fans knew enough to hate King George from the beginning, back when
slightly more than half the country thought he pooped marshmallows and the
mainstream media ate gratefully from his plutocratic palm. While the
lumpenproles make the painful adjustment to reality — their fearless
leader is an incompetent fraud controlled by a cabal of imperialist Iagos
— they need someone to give voice to their confusion. They
don’t want some nerdy Nation subscriber to tell them they’ve been had; they
want to commiserate with someone as inconstant and uncertain as themselves,
someone who was lulled by the lies for awhile and woke up feeling angry,
scared, and betrayed. They don’t need a weatherman to know which way
the wind blows; they need a weathervane. It might as well be Neil Young, whose ideological
vicissitudes defy all reason. He is like a hurricane, to borrow a simile
from one of his songs. The right-wing bloggers call him a moonbat, but the
term is inapt: A moonbat, as defined by Adriana Cronin-Lukas, is
“someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency.”
Only through the most abstruse calculations of advanced chaos theory could
anyone discern a consistent pattern in Young’s political opinions. In
the ’70s, he went from excoriating Richard Nixon (“Ohio”)
to exculpating him (“Campaigner”). In the ’80s, he
embraced nukes and Reaganomics and fretted about AIDS-infected
“faggots” fouling the supermarket produce. By the end of that
decade, he was ragging on Bush père with “Rockin’ in the Free World”
(“We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man/We got a
kinder, gentler machine-gun hand”). Like so many others, he freaked
out after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, endorsing the Patriot Act and
releasing the hawkish “Let’s Roll.” Now, not quite five
years later, he’s trippin’ down the hippie highway again: Living with War, his new
album, is a 10-track indictment of Bush Jr.’s presidency, the
misadventure in Iraq, and the malignancy of consumer culture. To top it all
off, Young, who has lived in this country since the late ’60s and
whose children were born here, remains a Canadian citizen. He can’t
even vote! The Fox News diatribes pretty much write themselves. But maybe this zeitgeist-coasting, whiplash-inducing
impulsivity makes Young the ideal American everyman. Like Walt Whitman, he
contradicts himself because he is large and contains multitudes. Leave
Michelle Malkin and her small-minded minions to carp about consistency;
Neil sounds his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. There’s
something indescribably thrilling in the way he preaches to the choir with
the help of a literal choir, the way those bellicose trumpets bolster his
trademark six-string snarl, the way his sorrowful yelp subsides into a sea
of anonymous gospel voices. Who cares if he bit most of the melodies from
his own back catalog? Who cares if the album’s centerpiece,
“Let’s Impeach the President,” with its bridge cobbled
together from Bush soundbites and its gleeful fillips of “flip”
and “flop,” is more like a bumper-sticker collage than a
finished song? The entire CD was written and recorded in a mere two weeks
this past April, and it sounds like it — all ragged glory, reckless
ranting, and righteous outrage. Even if we know from hard experience that
it’s only temporary, having him on our side again feels too damned
good to resist.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2006.
