The one song Neil Young said he couldn’t sing anymore
There’s nothing in the music business that said Neil Young had to go along with the program.
He was always willing to do his own thing, and while his label might have had other opinions about what that should have sounded like, that was frankly too damn bad every time Young worked on a new record. What he was working on always had to come from the heart before it focused on following trends, but that didn’t mean that each song had to necessarily have staying power every single time he mastered a record.
Let’s face it: it’s not like Young has been the most consistent artist in the world. He was definitely going in his own direction when working on some of his classics like Rust Never Sleeps and Harvest, but when looking at how the 1980s treated him, it’s not like he’s having fond memories of working on records like Landing on Water. Even if an album like Trans was a labour of love, it’s not like everyone was asking him to go synthetic all of a sudden.
Because the Neil Young that most people knew was a lot more cut and dry than the glossy synths that he surrounded himself with. Despite being from Canada, there’s no other artist that seemed to have a better sense of what Americana music sounded like than Young did, and when listening to a lot of his greatest work, his strength was always in painting a picture of the world he saw around him rather than going inward all the time.
Tonight’s the Night may be a fine album of emotional pain, but the fact that he managed to get away with a song like ‘Ohio’ with Crosby, Stills, and Nash is astounding. No one was looking to tackle subjects like that head-on, but Young lost the ability to give a shit a long time ago, and he wasn’t about to suddenly start because a label told him to.
But he did know that he could overstep his bounds more than a few times. There were some genuinely disgusting plankton posing as people in the American South, but even though ‘Southern Man’ laid all of the problems with those people out plain and simple, Young did end up reeling back when he realised he was painting with a much broader brush than he should have been.
Make no mistake, people needed to be called out for their allegiance to injustice, but Young figured it was better for him to retire that song for a while because of how much anger he had, saying, “I don’t feel like it’s particularly relevant. It’s not Southern Man. It’s White Man. It’s much bigger than Southern Man.” If you take the lyrics on their own, though, nothing that Young said was inherently wrong there, either.
A lot of the racial tension that was happening in the American South had become a lot more pronounced when the Civil Rights movement started, and even if Young wasn’t looking to browbeat, he had zero tolerance for racial intolerance, either. He believed that people could be treated equally, and even if the South had a hard time catching up, the brief spat that he had with Lynyrd Skynyrd pretty much taught him on the spot that it wasn’t strictly a Southern issue all the time.
That kind of intolerance has no boundaries, and whether you are a blue-collar worker on the street, a wealthy aristocrat, or a corrupt politician, anyone can find themselves making those kinds of indecent decisions. Young may have been abusing the South a bit too blanketly, but given how outspoken he has been for political concerns now, it’s not like every other word of it isn’t still resonant
