An Image Completely Separate from the Rest of the Review, So It Goes First
There's this movie called Cool Hand Luke.
Paul Newman plays a convict, Luke Jackson, who's been sentenced to live on this work farm, whose other resident convicts includes Dragline, played by George Kennedy. Dragline has it in for Luke from the moment he steps onto the grounds. In the movie's pivotal first climax, Dragline challenges Luke to a fight in the yard.
Dragline's a gummy, rough-hewn sort, the yard's standard of physical prowess. He's toughened himself into this kind of battle monster, oblivious to everything except his own dumb bullying, brute might. He talks a mediocre game, but does so loudly, and cajoles Luke into fighting him primarily by being loud and annoying.
Luke is detached, aloof, having arrived in the joint seemingly under the postulation that he would be fighting whatever he had to alone. He's pink-slipped his vulnerability, although you can tell he's got some tenderness in him, compartmentalized, buried deep. But nothing that will stop him from taking Dragline on in a fistfight. He does not deny the standard rite of passage; he just approaches it morosely and begrudgingly. Let's get the damn thing over with.
A-type Dragline, needless to say, whips Luke's ass. After a minute or two it becomes clear that Dragline's the winner. Luke gets knocked down time after time after time, and finally at some point, Dragline just stops fighting him. But Luke keeps getting up, swinging. By the end of the sequence, Luke is standing alone, throwing punches into the air, refusing to end the fight just because the other guy, the one who won, has left the ring. He keeps swinging, weakly, obsessively, at nothing but the dim light of the stockade yard.
The victorious Dragline is visibly confused at the denouement's first stage, watching Luke punch nothing. But later he changes his tune about Luke, and becomes his openly admiring ally. "He was some boy," Dragline enthuses later. "Cool Hand Luke. Hell, he's a natural-born world-shaker."
Neil Young's first electric guitar solo in "After the Garden," the first song of his Living With War, felt to me like the sonic equivalent of Luke manically boxing the air, raging alone until he felt he made his point. Neil Young has never been a guitar soloist of incredible technical skill; he doesn't fly up and down the fretboard in hopes of establishing a land-speed record. (Remember the one-note solo in "Cinnamon Girl"? I mean, come on. The absolute fewest notes you can play in a guitar solo is one. If you played less notes, you wouldn't have a solo -- you'd have a pregnant pause.)
What Young's solos do have is incredible evocation. I don't know if there's some overtone or undertone thing he's doing, but for every swath of technical flash his solos omit, there's threefold the thematic, emotional richness that serves the song's heart better than a wank-fest would. The guitar solo in "After the Garden" is the quintessence of clunk. It's two alternating notes per chord segment, clumsily played, riveted, bleeding around the treble end, dropping on a floor with the subtlety of the feet of a drunken lummox clomping to the refrigerator to find some lard to snack on.
If you know me, you know I mean that as a compliment. In the face of a structured environment -- a largely disinterested republic, a music industry too enfeebled to take a stand, a backdrop of war that alternately tires and vexes the private sector -- Young's loutish guitar is standing alone on the bridge, punching at nothing but the dim light of the stockade yard, with its lumbering, descending two-note figures. Young is swinging at nothing and anything, and doing so alone. It is almost unfairly effective, and "After the Garden" is one of Young's best-ever Track 1's, the perfect opening for an album that's far, far different than the media -- perhaps Young himself -- has led us to believe.
The Rest of the Review
Living With War was written and recorded in the heat of Young's very critical emotions about the State of the Union. Attention has centered on the album's title, and the sulphorous anthem "Let's Impeach the President." Routine-issue media hype about the album called it a "political protest record."
Well, to be fair, that's what Young's called it too: a "folk metal protest record." He dropped the name of Phil Ochs, the explicitly political (and in my opinion, not always very good) folk songwriter of the '60s, who hanged himself when he decided he had fought to a draw at best. All indicators called Living With War the recorded equivalent of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, leaving no puffy bureaucrat or deceptively lean President standing in the end.
But it can't be that way, because this is a Neil Young record. Sideliners forgot what exactly Neil Young does, and maybe even Young himself temporarily forgot his nature. His greatest works are, more often than not, elliptical, lyrically spare. They don't attempt to redress Big Issues. They reflect on the people involved, and their emotional consequences. Tonight's the Night takes place against the backdrop of death and addiction. But Young couldn't write a whole album's worth about the addiction: it has no story, only setting. Instead Tonight's the Night is about the wild and exhausted melancholy of the survivors.
What are you more interested in hearing: songs about the landscaping, or about the people walking around in it? Even Georgia O'Keefe's landscapes aren't about the desert. They're about the cacti and the mountain layers and the grains of sand. Neil Young cannot write a whole protest album about issues, because what makes more sense is talking about the people dwelling in the glare of those issues.
Living With War takes place on a giant soundstage. The landscaping is the errant war with Iraq and the culture of corruption in the U.S. government. The songs, though, are emotional snapshots. It's remarkable Young made this album in less than a month, because as tempting as it is for him to pull some reverse jingoism, he accomplishes something more fully realized. The bad government is Young's muse; if it were his habit to make such forces his obsession, his career would have stalled after Harvest. He wouldn't have any reason to keep going. Maybe that's what got Phil Ochs. I don't know.
The personal songs here, the howls of pain, confusion or misunderstanding, make the real point, and connect when Young acknowledges some sort of personal responsibility for the state of chaos we're in. Sure, there are lots of cut-out politicians to blame for turning people into "The Restless Consumer," and that blame might be accurate, but Young gets back to how America now cannot live without what used to be its luxuries. (I was in a "personal computer museum" yesterday afternoon and looked at the original relics of IT. It is hard to recall the time when we used 8-inch floppy discs, or how the function keys on Commodores had printing on their top and their sides, or how 10 megabytes of storage used to cost $500.)
Even in the title track, Neil Young isn't "Living With War" that other people are having; he's "living with war in my heart." He takes a "holy vow never to kill again." Answer me this: When did Neil Young kill anyone before? He didn't. So why does he feel the need to address it in such terms? Because the responsibility is shared. It's so much cooler than "The Man In the Mirror." Where's the Bush-bashing in that?
The humanism is scattered all over this album, just as enervation informed Tonight's the Night. The reference point is personal. Young waxes nostalgic about a time when there was no war, which is an era that never existed in North America as long as he's been alive. The war he's talking about is all internal. It's got correlations to the public spectrum, but he can't start off logically unless he takes his inventory.
Now, of course, there's a 100-voice choir singing most of the words on this album right along with Neil. But maybe it starts with them too. Maybe this is a shared realization everyone's having right now. Or they've been having it for a long time, but had no excuse to enter into a recording studio until Neil booked them. The album's best songs -- "After the Garden," "Roger and Out," and the unbearably lovely, loud and short "Families" -- all get back to being cut off from what makes Americans human. Hint: It's not the government. It's the people within our inner circle, our loved ones.
It is no surprise to me that the album's weakest song is -- tell me you didn't see this one coming -- "Let's Impeach the President." That's because it's a straight, accusatory protest song; as I've mentioned before, protest songs are usually marked by a potency limited by time. Anyone still singing songs about Nixon and pigs? My point. With its specific references to current events, "Let's Impeach the President" cements itself to a calendar. There are no calendars for infinity.
But hell, this is still Neil Young, the goddamn wild man -- so when he does sing "Let's Impeach the President," he makes the most of the opportunity. Temporal as it is, it's jaw-dropping to hear Young's savagery in action: "What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees/Would New Orleans have been safer that way?" That couplet exposes so much about the Bush Administration's hypocrisy it's almost cathartic in its own right.
"Let's Impeach the President" is the centerpiece of the album, which is a bit unfortunate. The musical composition sounds fairly phoned in. With the choir going in the background it sounds like a campfire singalong by freshman PoliSci majors who haven't declared yet. There are also awkwardly spliced samples of Bush's doublespeak, in between Young and choir yelling "Flip! Flop!" It's sloppy, and it doesn't quite work. But it's close to what Kanye West said to millions on television, and even Matt Lauer couldn't diss West for saying it.
The better political anthem is "Shock and Awe," which opens with the great line "History was the cruel judge of overconfidence." When Bush ordered his infamous "shock and awe" first wave against the enemy, he wasn't just talking about shocking and awing the enemy. He was also trying to shock and awe the private American citizen into blind acceptance of his program. The attacks were really two-fold, and what American could deny Bush anything immediately after 9/11? We were all shocked and awed. That's why Bush still brings up 9/11 all the time, most often in the context of "golden photo op(s)," as Neil says here. (Which reminded me immediately of satirical comedian Stephen Colbert, who tweaked the President at last weekend's White House Correspondents Dinner by praising how he's solved his administration's crises through outstanding "photo ops." Bush did not laugh.)
What's the point of talking about the music on the album? It's sloppy. It's a lot like Ragged Glory in parts. Neil sometimes cuts out slightly in his microphone, and the choir doesn't always sound like a can't-miss idea. None of that matters. It's strategy, or as Bush would call it, "strategery." Young can be forgiven for making an album less polished than usual, because the key is its immediacy.
Is it brave? Sure. But what's bravest about it is that Young did not water down his primary goal, which is to take a look at the how his subjects are affected, not to burn an effigy, which would have been too easy. There's a song, maybe two, about Bush, but there's a song about the hopes that the future will bring a more unifying force to the country ("Lookin' For a Leader"). There's a moment where Young screams "Don't need no stinkin' WAARRRR!", but there's also poignant reminiscence about a buddy who made an admirable sacrifice for his beliefs ("Roger and Out," which even works in a subplot about the hippie subculture). There's a fear that the garden will be gone, but also a choral rendition of "America the Beautiful" to remind everyone what's at stake (and, sort of, to give the album the unexpected feel of a song cycle).
Maybe Living With War can never be more than a product of its time. I'm not even sure it's going to change anything in the public discourse; it may only amplify the topic in certain audiences. Hell, it might not even get a Grammy. It's not his best recent album -- not with Freedom and Sleeps With Angels in circulation -- but it's almost certainly the best album anybody could have made with Young's modus operandi and his drive for currency. Despite its political charge, its Davidian fist-shaking and slingshot-twanging, it's true to Neil's code. It can't be all about the unreal or the unbelievable, which are two words to describe the "shadow government." It's about who gets hurt, what's taken away from them, and how they're going to get it back and make damn sure nobody steals from them again.
After all, it's not called Dying From War. I don't have any interest in hearing an album with that title. I'm pretty sure Neil Young has no interest in making one. The recovery effort is too important to be left to the fatalists.
