‘Love and War’: Neil Young’s bleak look at conflict
Anyone who claims to understand the modern world is lying to you. It’s a genuinely terrifying statement, but it’s the truth. The information age has brought us all so close together, which only amplifies our differences and ends up making the world a bigger, more confusing place than it has ever been. As ever, this means that bad-faith actors seeking to make a buck can always count on a steady stream of terrified marks looking for anything resembling stability. Instead, we should be looking towards folks like Neil Young, those who are unafraid to show how vulnerable they are.
It’s always been one of the defining and most humanising elements of a songwriter that could have so easily disappeared above a glass ceiling. Occasionally reappearing below it to collect some stadium paychecks and then rise back above it, making sure it’s stuck firm for anyone else. So many of his peers did that, but there’s always been something more human about Young.
It’s not even a “man of the people” quality, either. Young would be the first to tell you that his status as a rock and roll icon disqualifies him from relating to his audience. Young, though, is still very much the man who wrote one of his defining hits about how much he related to the loneliness of a man of a different generation, how they both “need someone to love me the whole day through”.
This was a streak that never left him either, all the way up to his magnificent 2010 record, Le Noise. An album made when Young was probably older than the person ‘Old Man’ was written about decades before. In the 21st century, it’s almost become passe to go full Bono and take on “the issues of the day”, and when confronted with an artist like Neil Young releasing a song called ‘Love And War’, you might roll your eyes and feel like you know what to expect.
Then Young opens his mouth, and from the very opening lyric, we’re treated to something very different. “When I sing about love and war / I don’t really know what I’m saying” is one hell of a statement. One that cuts right to the core of modern life in its maddening, confusing “glory”. Young uses the song to say what true wisdom teaches you, which is that you don’t know anything and that you were a fool to ever think you did.
The stark nature of the lyrics is matched in kind by the music. Le Noise is an album that, despite being mainly comprised of Young and a guitar, still finds a way of being noisy as hell. Mainly, Young shrieks and howls over a solo electric guitar, its chords fed through countless pedals and amps cranked as far as they’ll go. Until ‘Love and War’ begins over an exhausted acoustic strum of haunting minor chords, Young’s unmistakable keen never rising above a sigh.
God knows we need moments of catharsis. Most of the time, that means punching the air, standing forthright in our convictions, and acting as we stand against the tide of the modern world. It’s a nice little fantasy. True catharsis, though, comes in moments of radical vulnerability. When someone is truly brave enough to do as Neil Young does here, whether via song or via conversation, that means opening up and saying, “I’m terrified too”.
