The last time we heard from Neil Young, he was sitting on the proverbial front porch, chewing on his psychedelic pill and muttering between the misty-eyed idealism of his youth and the commercial self-indulgence of the present.
In 2015 Young is back, and he’s still not impressed with the world he thought he was helping to create. Sure, on A New Day for Love, the opening track from The Monsanto Years, Young seems to suggest it’s 1967 all over again and we’re all going to hold hands and shed our fiscal obsessions and social prejudices like an ill-fitting double breasted suit. But it’s irony laced with sarcasm; beneath the façade of community lies the unbackable winner of self-interest.
Wolf Moon provides a centring context for Young’s subsequent rants: the natural world is full of splendid sights and sounds, but peer closely enough and you can see the shadowy business interests reducing nature to an inventory of exploitable intellectual property rights. On People Want to Hear About Love, Young is torn: Marx claimed religion is the opium of the masses, but the modern opiate is the insipid platitudes of the political class, offered up to distract attention away from the self-serving agendas of Chevron, Coca Cola and any number of corporate behemoths.
By the time Big Box comes around, Young has taken to the hills, his armoury the colourful, albeit contradictory discourse of the libertarian fighting the cause of a nebulous popular front, draped in the Norman Rockwell-sponsored mythology of a proud working American population.
The message of A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop is two-fold: it’s a talk of the evils of Starbucks and its ilk, cloaking themselves in the veneer of alternative culture, and an expose of the myriad of corporate relationships that make up the abstract concept that is ‘the market’. Workin’ Man is a thinly-veiled re-working of Bobby Womack’s It’s All Over Now, which is surely deliberate. The workin’ man has struggled against The System and The Man, and he’s lost his money, job and livelihood, but retained his identity.
The Monsanto Years gives corporate influence a name, and its name is Monsanto, the agribusiness ogre so protective of its intellectual property and, according to counter-culture rumour, so willing to litigate against the most innocent individual in its quest to preserve its capitalist interests.
By the time If I Don’t Know comes around to finish the record, Young recognises he might just be the crazy old hippy fighting the lost battles of yore. Maybe this is the future he was fighting for, and he missed the memo in the blizzard of cocaine, stadium rock tours and ponderous self-indulgence that was the 1970s and ‘80s.
The Monsanto Years is as lofty, confused and contradictory as the rhetoric of the hyper-capitalist Benjamin Franklin and the slave-owners Thomas Jefferson and George Washington (all of whom feature in the reproduction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the insert to the record). But fuck it, there’s bad shit going down, and someone’s got to say something – and that someone is Neil Young. Thank God for Neil.
BY PATRICK EMERY
