Neil Young's quixotic crusade: a song can't change the world

Eggheads and dumbbells alike have overestimated pop culture's power to transform society--a misapprehension that goes back to Plato, who believed that when the modes of music changed, the walls of cities shook. In fact, it's usually just the hairstyles that change. Sometimes footwear.

Still, the news that Neil Young rush-recorded an album titled Living With War, containing a song called "Impeach the President," has had the media world abuzz, both pro and con. Young told CNN he wanted the record to carry a message of togetherness and unification. Most likely it will unite us in revulsion or boredom. The last president brought down by a working popular entertainer was Lincoln.

There are many potential pitfalls on the path from political pop to real-world change. As with Bruce Springsteen's bitter vets lament, "Born in the USA," the music can be hijacked by political forces you despise, such as Ronald Reagan; it can turn into a largely ineffectual part of a hip marketing image, as with Rage Against the Machine; or it can be covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary. The least likely effect is to change the larger political world in any appreciable way (though we can thank Styx's Kilroy Was Here for averting--so far!--a rock-'n'-roll-banning theocracy).

That's not to say a song can't be a useful, delightful combination of aesthetic merit and political wisdom. But when it comes to pop music, from the most Satanic metal to the most heavenly Jesus pop, nothing's funnier than earnestness. No one joined the Peace Corps after hearing "Dawn of Correction," the liberal establishment Spokesmen's answer song to the hippie anthem "Eve of Destruction"; it just became a silly track to fill out modern hipsters' mix CDs. (Sample lyric: "What about the things that deserve commendation?/ Where there once was no cure, there's vaccination/Where there once was a desert, there's vegetation/Self-government's replacing colonization." Yes, they were serious.) "Abraham, Martin, and John" and "They Killed Him" lament fallen heroes, but they inspire more derisive chuckles than tears, despite their serious and well-intentioned subject matter.

No doubt (OK, given the poor quality of most of Young's recent work, there's some doubt) Living With War will move many souls. Private life pleasures become all the more important as the specter of war and dysfunctional politics haunts the land. The real problem is, no matter how many citizens are unhappy with Bush--more than half of us these days--there isn't really a damn thing any of us can do about it now, except count down the next 30 or so months with increasing impatience. While disapproval of the war in Iraq grows, the administration lust digs in deeper and plans the next Mideast vacation for U.S. troops.

The very existence of protest music says something heartening. Yankee Doodle Dandies can declare with pride that this is a country where you can hire 100 union musicians to sing about impeaching the president in the hallowed studios of Capitol Records, where legendary American Frank Sinatra downed highballs and charmed the dames with impeccable phrasing, and no jackbooted thugs or Mr. Robotos will break down the studio doors and drag you to the jailhouse.

Neil proudly pointed that "union" detail out to the media. Ironies and turnarounds are the meat of this delicate folkie cure clumsy rocker, Reagan lover cum Bush basher, mocker of welfare mothers (they "make better lovers") and lamenter of the plight of the homeless, a man who gets angry over Kent State and wistful over Montezuma, writer of the git-r-done post-Flight 93 "Let's Roll" (which advises, in phrases that could have come straight from a Bush foreign policy powwow: "No time for indecision/We got to make a move ... You got to turn on evil/When it's coming after you") who now hits us in Living With War with "I take a holy vow/to never kill again/Try to remember peace." Young is a writer, and one shouldn't presume that his songs always express his own views. So I won't make too much of the fact that he wrote "Union Man," the funniest, most contempt-dripping song about unionized musicians ever (featuring a proud union man who "makes meetings when I can," meetings busy with decisions about bumper stickers).

Of course, it's America, dammit, and our artists, native or Canadian, for the president or against him, are free to say whatever they want about whomever they want. And see what good it does them.

So why do pop artists go political, despite the risk of ridicule, misunderstanding, and ineffectuality? The answer can be found in that old joke about why dogs lick their balls: because they can. Political pop, alas, is usually just as productive.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty (bdoherty@reason.com) is the author of This Is Burning Man (Little Brown).

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