NEW NEIL YOUNG SONG: "IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT"

Very cool. And somebody was telling me recently that they had heard old Neil Young had turned toward the right. Sounds like they heard wrong. From DownWithTyranny courtesy of Eschaton:

Just after debuting his new film at SxSW Neil shocked the music world by announcing, kind of off-the-cuff, that he had recorded a brand new album and that it's all ready to go. (The guy introducing him, SxSW director Roland Swenson, had referred to how important Neil's song "Ohio," about the National Guard shooting down college students at Kent State, was to another generation then gearing up to end an earlier unpopular war, and how we needed something like that now. Neil took it seriously.) The new album is called LIFE IN WAR.

One of Neil's collaborators, filmmaker, Jonathan Demme, describes it as "a brilliant electric assault on Bush and the war in Iraq.” The linchpin track, "Impeach the President," features an edited-together Bush rap set to a 100-voice chorus chanting "flip/flop." The album, with Young on Old Black, Rick Rosas on bass and Chad Cromwell on drums, took three days to finish. Yep; that's Neil. No release date is set yet but... hopefully it'll be before November.

Click here for the rest.

The way I understand music history in this country, all the political rock bands of the 60s were something of an aberration. That is, the conventional wisdom in the music industry has been and still is something to the effect of politics is bad for sales. What happened in the 60s is that the youth culture and its anti-authoritarian attitudes became so popular, so quickly, that the music industry essentially lost control of its product: if they didn't sell anti-war and political stuff, they would be losing money. Kind of like what happened in the early 90s with the rise of grunge--record companies were going to Seattle and signing everyone they could for fear of losing a ride on the train. Of course, by the 70s record executives were able to successfully move artists in a more introspective, and therefore apolitical, direction. Anti-authoritarianism was retained, but in a rather pointless sex-drug-rock and roll manifestation. Hard politics in popular music was thrown out on the trash heap. There are, of course, exceptions, Rage Against the Machine being one, but they generally operate outside of the musical establishment, finding popularity on their own. Anyway, it's nice to see that some of the old guard from the 60s still have some bite about them; you'd never see any of the boy bands or shrill divas of today being allowed to take such a risk. Go Neil!

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