In 1993, Neil Young predicted what life will be like in 100 years
Neil Young has lived a thousand lives in one. He’s the ‘Godfather of Grunge’, a guitar hero, folk star, filmmaker, activist, model train expert, hearse driver, master bard, and a whole lot more.
His impact on music and culture has been so tremendous that if you were to delete his contributions from the annals of history, everything else that came afterwards would look markedly different. That’s how important he has been to the expansion of culture. He is an artistic juggernaut. And he’s gained a wealth of experience along the way. Such a wealth, in fact, that his thoughts on the future feel rather apt.
On his second album, 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young laid down some of the essential foundations for alt-rock, and without this masterpiece in fuzzy guitar playing, we’d be without so many of our favourite guitar bands. He recognised a trend, and he pioneered a new advancement to match it. It’s a testament to his skill that a host of legends such as Sonic Youth, Radiohead and Nirvana worship him as a god amongst men.
Young’s impact has been so significant that his influence extends far beyond music. His early 1970s aesthetic was even the inspiration for Doc Sportello in Paul Thomas Anderson’s flick Inherent Vice, and as a philanthropist, he’s relentlessly campaigned for righteous causes such as environmental and anti-war efforts.
Showing just how far his influence goes, his concert film, 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, provided the foundation for all future concert movies. It is a little-known fact that it was the primary inspiration for Talking Heads’ 1984 classic, Stop Making Sense.
Given that he is so revered and future-facing in his approach, it is only appropriate that Young’s opinions are treasured. Whether it be his thoughts on punk, the environment or other artists, Young has consistently demonstrated himself to be a deep thinker, possessing a perception that us laymen can only dream of.
While he’s been guilty of a few flubbed comments along the way, he remains a captivating voice on a whole manner of subjects. And as figures who encounter all walks of life, from David Bowie predicting the internet to David Byrne imagining technopoly, alternative musicians tend to be very good gauges of what lies ahead.
During a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, the Canadian troubadour gave us his thoughts on what life will be like in 100 years’ time, and while some of his account is conceivable, other parts have been rightly consigned to the dustbin of history.
Young started off by explaining his thoughts on society and how humans fit into the natural order of the earth. “I’m not into organised religion,” he began, “I’m into believing in a higher source of creation, realising we’re all just part of nature and we’re all animals. We’re very highly evolved and we should be very responsible for what we’ve learned.”
Perhaps under the influence of something, or maybe just carrying on the karmic sentiment of the counterculture, Young posited, “I even go as far as to think that in the natural plan of things, that the rockets and the satellites, spaceships that we’re creating now, that we’re pollinating the universe.”
Are we really intergalactic bees in the midst of our first flights? Given the advent of Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme, and Virgin Orbit’s plans to go to Mars, Young’s next point echoes the developments that have occurred in recent times. Though it seems that all these decades later, austerity might have changed his view on whether space exploration is really as necessary as he thought it seemed in the 1990s.
Back then, he said, “Earth is a flower and it’s pollinating. It’s starting to send out things and now we’re evolving they’re getting bigger and they’re able to go further. And they have to, because we need to spread out now in the universe. I think in 100 years we’ll be living on other planets.” He certainly wasn’t a shrinking violet with this claim!
I doubt that people will have colonised planets by 2093, but you just never know. Before we think about taking off to other galactic climes, though, we should seriously think about getting our own house in order. And that’s exactly what Young posited himself back in 1970 with vital verse: “Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s”.
