Neil Young is "living with war"

Neil Young recorded a great new album that was published this May. So to say it is his personal judgement against the American president and his politics, a loud criticism against the war. Young never was the average ideological critic of the government, his statements were always were personal and honestly emotional. That made him also supporting Reagan´s cold war doctrine, later playing "Imagine" for the support of the American victims after 11th September 2001, and now makes him attacking the Bush-administration. His perspective is a genuine American one, you do not here so much about the Iraqi victims or Guantanamo, for example. And his criticism of the president is maybe a bit naive and not wide enough. Will it be enough if you just change the person on the top?
But after all "Living with war" is a great rock-album with guitar-sounds that prove you why Young is still one of the greatests rockers in the free world. Let´s see some of the lyrics now:

Who is Bush? Just a "shadow man runnin´ the government". He led the USA to danger ("the garden is gone") and the people are "living with war".
The first two songs are in my eyes not the best of the album, but the third one ("Restless consumer") opens with some angry guitar chords that falsificate a statement Pete Townshend had given decades ago: that Rock´n´Roll can be played only by angry and frustrated young people. Neil Young shows how a 61-year old can express all his dissatisfaction about what is going wrong in the world just by playing his guitar. And his dissatisfation is not only directed against the war but also against a superficial consumer culture:

"Don't need no TV ad
Tellin' me how sick I am
Don't want to know how many people are like me
Don't need no dizziness
Don't need no nausea
Don't need no side effects like diarrhea or sexual death
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies

The restless consumer lies
Asleep in her hotel
With such an appetite
For anything that sells"

In the fourth song, Young sings about the present political situation again:

"Back in the days of shock and awe
We came to liberate them all
History was the cruel judge of overconfidence
Back in the days of shock and awe"

Young then takes the position of the average American families that give their sons (and daughters) to the war-machine and concludes in the album´s climax, a hymnal postulation:

"Let's impeach the President for lying
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

Who's the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
They bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let's impeach the President for spying
On citizens inside their own homes [...]"

and "for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected".

The centre of this song is a passage in which contradictional statements of Bush are cut together (Flip and Flop), for example: "Saddam Hussein got weapons of mass destruction" (Flip) - "Until now we haven´t found any weapons of mass destruction" (Flop).

Young tells us also what should be after this impeachment: He is..
"Lookin’ for a leader
To bring our country home
Reunite the red white and blue
Before it turns to stone
[...]
We’re lookin’ for a leader
With the Great Spirit on his side
[...]
Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it’s a woman
Or a black man after all"

But could just a new Washington or Kennedy solve all the problems? Is not the global economic situation (the dependence on oil for example) more complicated? The album ends with a hundred-voiced choir: "America the beautiful". It is a very patriotic thing and one gets aware of a typical habit in the USA - a quasi-religious attitude towards the nation.

A street in Beirut

Syd Barrett (1946-2006) - The piper is gone

Roger "Syd" Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, died last week. For more than 30 years he disappeared from the music scene which had once made him the prince of swinging London in the summer of 1967. He was the genius of the band that came out of the project "The Architectual Abdabs" with Mason, Waters and Wright, he created a completely new sound, he wrote almost all the music and lyrics on Pink Floyd's debut album "The piper at the gates of dawn". With intergalactic psychedelic sounds and quadrophenic amps, Pink Floyd smashed the UFO-club playing songs like "Astronomy domine" and ear-movies like "Interstellar overdrive". The drugs worked and a permanent consume of LSD left his traces in Barrett's head. For some time it pushed his creativity to write psychedelic pop-songs, but then he developed more and more eccentric and confused, in some concerts he is said to have played only one chord ever and ever again through the whole time.
"And if the band you´re in starts playing different tunes, I´ll see you on the dark side of the moon." his former colleagues sang later. Barrett left Pink Floyd during the "A soucerful of secrets"-recordings in 1968 and was replaced by the more balanced blues-guitarist David Gilmore. A few solo recordings with some golden moments remained, like on "The madcap laughs", then he left the music-scene completely. The Pink Floyd-musicians were shocked when Barrett who had changed to an overweight, bald-headed, shy man visited them in the studios in 1975. Where was the old Syd, the master-mind, the genius, the poet? The songs "Wish you were here" and "Shine on you crazy diamond" are dedicated to him:

"You reached for the secret too soon,
You cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night,
And exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome
With random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!"

But Barrett prefered living in quietness with his family, far away from the Pink Floyd-hype, just concerned with his own thoughts, painting and daily work.
"Once something was over, it was over. He felt no need to revisit it.
That’s why he avoided contact with journalists and fans. He simply couldn’t understand the interest in something that had happened so long ago and he wasn’t willing to interrupt his own musings for their sake.", his sister said in a Sunday Times-interview (on 16th July).
Now it is clear that the piper has left for ever. But also if it "had happened so long ago" his spirit is shining on through his music ...

Football World Champion 2006: Italy