Neil Young, Living with War

Neil Young's new album Living with War will release Tuesday, May 9, but for now it is being streamed for free at http://www.neilyoung.com, where you can and should go to listen to it. Neil Young's music has always been interesting. Two of his recent albums, Greendale and Prairie Wind, are classics--music written by an intelligent, thinking man with years of experience and living behind him. Prairie Wind seems to come from Young's close brush with death as the result of a brain aneurysm, treated successfully by surgery two years ago. Greendale is a concept album about a family in rural California that runs afoul of the law, the media, and bad luck. The brilliance of Greendale lies in its willingness to consider the murder of a policeman and the bad luck of a family from every angle. Young knows that life is unfair in a way for which there is no solution, but he is angry with it anyway, and in Greendale he examines the difficulty of living unfettered in the modern age. Young is especially bothered by the media's ever-present curiosity about private affairs, about the impossibility of privacy.

Living with War is a protest album--protest music in its essential and most topical form. As many reviewers have pointed out, it is an album with rough edges, raw and painful music, and a series of songs that make brilliant, biting commentary on what is happening to our nation under the current president--the war in Iraq, the religious right, the media, excessive consumerism, the crass hollow core of what the American dream has become--all of these come under the scrutiny of his eye and voice. Whether you agree with Young's point of view or not, this is a powerful album. I especially like the opening song, "After the Garden Is Gone," which has to do with what Young regards as the loss of America and its promise. "Let's Impeach the President" is far more subtle and nuanced that its title would suggest, yet the song is powerful and compelling and angry. "The Flags of Freedom" is a tribute to Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom," updated and recast to encompass the concerns of our present situation.

Living with War is a great work of musical protest.