Neil Young’s bleak take on conflict

On By Pranco

Neil Young - 2023 - Musician

(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)

Anyone who claims to understand the modern world is lying to you. It’s a truly terrifying statement, but it’s the truth. The information age has brought us all so close together, which only deepens our differences and ultimately makes the world a bigger and more confusing place than ever before. As always, this means that bad faith actors looking to make money can always count on a steady stream of terrified targets looking for anything resembling stability. Instead, we should look at people like Neil Youngthose who are not afraid to show how vulnerable they are.

It has always been one of the defining and most humanizing elements of a songwriter that could so easily have disappeared above a glass ceiling. Every now and then he reappears beneath it to collect some stadium pay and then rises above it again, just to make sure he’s firmly in place for someone else. Many of his colleagues did, but there was always something more human about Young.

It’s not even a ‘man of the people’ quality either. Young would be the first to tell you that his status as a rock ‘n’ roll icon disqualifies him from relationships with his audience. However, Young is still very much the man who wrote one of his defining hits about how he related to the loneliness of a man from a different generation, how they both “need someone to love me all day.”

This was a streak that never left him, until his beautiful record of 2010, Le Noise. An album made when Young was probably older than the person ‘Old Man’ written decades before. In the 21st century it has become almost passé to go all out for Bono and tackle “the issues of the day”, and when you are confronted with an artist like Neil Young who releases a song called ‘Love And War’ , you might roll your eyes and feel like you know what to expect.

Then Young opens his mouth, and from the opening lyrics we are treated to something completely different. “When I sing about love and war / I don’t really know what I’m saying” is a great statement. One that cuts straight to the heart of modern life in its maddening, confusing ‘glory’. Young uses the song to say what true wisdom teaches you, which is that you know nothing and that you were a fool to ever think you did.

The grim nature of the lyrics is similarly matched by the music. Le Noise is an album that, despite being mostly Young and a guitar, still finds a way to be incredibly loud. Young mainly screams and cries over an electric lead guitar, the chords of which are fed through countless pedals and amplifiers are turned up as far as possible. Until “Love and War” begins with an exhausted acoustic strumming of haunting minor chords, Young’s undeniable enthusiasm never rises above a sigh.

God knows we need moments of catharsis. Usually that means punching the air, being outspoken in our beliefs, and acting against the grain of the modern world. It’s a fun little fantasy. However, true catharsis comes in moments of radical vulnerability. If someone is really brave enough to do what Neil Young does here, through song or through conversation, it means opening up and saying, “I’m terrified too.”

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