The lyric Neil Young thought was too cliché: “It’s terrible”
Neil Young has always been a beautiful contradiction throughout his work. He never made one step in his career that he didn’t want to make, and although a lot of people may have heard the most beautiful acoustic folk ever conceived on one record, it wouldn’t take him long to blow your ears out with stomping hard rock just one album later. But even with his massive output, he did have standards, and one of them almost led to him discarding one of his classic lyrics, ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’.
That is if anyone was still paying attention to Young at this point. Because sometime after the start of the 1980s, Young had hit a major slump and was making some of the worst music he would ever create, like Everybody’s Rockin’ and Landing on Water, each of which seemed like they were designed to piss off anyone who wanted to hear the guy who sang ‘Heart of Gold’ a few years earlier.
And while his comeback with Crosby, Stills, and Nash was supposed to be a major return to form, American Dream feels like the textbook definition of the word ‘soulless’. Outside of a few highlights, Young was still on autopilot to some extent, but he corrected that with a vengeance the minute that he hit upon Freedom.
Considering the number of fiery tracks that he has on this album, it almost sounds like Young was hoarding all of his best songs for himself when with the supergroup, especially with ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’. Bookending both ends of the album with an acoustic and electric version, a tune about the struggles of someone trying to find their way in the world remains one of the most pressing lyrics in Young’s discography.
While Young knew that the chorus line was too good not to use, he almost removed it before releasing what he had on his hands, saying, “I wrote that song out on the road. I really don’t remember, except I know I wrote it all on my bus. I thought of the first line, rocking in the free world, keep on rocking in the free world. I said, Oh God, that really says something, but that’s such a cliché, it’s terrible, [but] it’s such an obvious thing, and then I knew I had to use it!”
Yes, the line about rocking in the free world does sound like the kind of washed-up ageing rock star is croaking it, but that wasn’t what Young looked like. He knows that certain clichés exist for a reason, and by pairing that line with scenarios of kids who will never get the chance to fall in love, that sense of irony sounds more and more like a Greek tragedy.
And Young couldn’t have hoped for better timing on it, either. Since the world was quickly moving towards an authentic approach to rock and roll with grunge, Young became the unofficial archetype for many bands’ sounds, with Pearl Jam even co-opting him as their musical uncle when working on ‘I Got Id’ and recording the album Mirror Ball with him.
Despite hanging out with the new kids in town, ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’ is still the kind of universal song that anyone could find value in. Sure, a classic rocker is singing it, but it doesn’t matter if he had the same fire that he had when he was laying down tracks for Rust Never Sleeps decades prior.
