perfidy

I've been on a deep and serious Neil Young kick recently. My wife and I are Modified Neil Completists, which implies that we seek out everything we can by him that is not Silver and Gold or Are You Passionate?, two titles that, hard as we try, we cannot accept as Neillerific. Even the oft-maligned Trans, which featured Young using programmed drums, vocoders, and synthesizers (in 1982!!!) has been rehabilitated by the news that he made the album at the same time he was learning to use computers to communicate with his severely handicapped sons. Besides, now that Beck's been around for ten years or so, crossing country with robotics no longer seems weird and wrong.

I mean, we are completists. Aside from all the studio stuff, we have more than a dozen bootlegs of live and unreleased material including a four-disc live set spanning Young's entire career from Buffalo Springfield to 1994. So it came as a bit of a shock to my wife to find that I'd never listened to Decade, Young's three-disc summation of his first ten years in the spotlight. That deficiency remedied, I am now stuck on listening to Young's great lost classic "Winterlong" on auto-repeat. It may be the greatest rock song ever written.

But forget all that. I'm just rambling like a phanatique. What I really want to point out is that Neil Young is a goddamned prophet. Have you listened to "Rockin' in the Free World" (off 1989's Freedom recently? You really should. The lyrics, especially the first stanza, mean a hell of a lot more now than they did in 1989. I mean.... damn.

There's colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign
on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin'
we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan,
but I am to them
So I try to forget it,
any way I can.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away,
and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life,
and what she's done to it
There's one more kid
that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores
and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes
for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people,
says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn,
got roads to drive.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.