The two songs Neil Young will always regret writing: “I don’t know what that means”
Music has always been an excellent form of expressionism, in fact, this is arguably one of the most important aspects of music that there is. For as long as there is human endeavour, there is conflict, and for as long as there is conflict, there will be expression. All of this culminates in artists such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young, who use music not only to bring joy and melody but also to express themselves without limitation.
A lot of the time, this expression comes in the form of writing honestly about specific emotions. We listen to a number of tracks by people like Neil Young and hear him pour his heart out, not holding back and happy to lay his soul bare for his listeners. This often forms a connection with the audience that listeners recognise as personal, even though the song wasn’t specifically written about them.
Love songs tend to have this impact on us. With emotions such as these, which we all experience but struggle to articulate, when someone else is able to convey your feelings perfectly, it creates a sonic bond between creator and consumer, which is unlike anything else.
Sociologist Thomas J Scheff explores this feeling in his book, What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Emotions and Relationships in Popular Songs. “In [many] years of teaching college students, I couldn’t help but notice that for many of them, popular songs held a special meaning, as they did to me when I was their age…” he wrote, “Popular love lyrics present a picture of an imagined social-emotional world, and modern societies tend to ignore this world. Since modern societies are highly individualistic, the nature of relationships usually takes a backseat. Modern societies focus on the self-reliant individual.”
Of course, there are instances when the feelings written by the musician don’t align with our own. This isn’t an issue when it comes to songs that explore emotions. As said earlier, these are subjective emotions that we struggle to describe, so if we hear someone also try to describe said emotion and fail, we just don’t connect with the song. The very nature of art is this freedom to choose what we do and don’t connect with. However, where this might seem harmless in songs surrounding emotion, it can be incredibly disruptive when people write about forms of expression, for instance, their political beliefs.
Again, we revert to Neil Young for this, as while he was happy to write about different feelings, he was also willing to write about his political and societal beliefs. He was raised in Canada and was a proud liberal, meaning he had thoughts and feelings about particular regions in America that could prove somewhat divisive. He was never afraid to make these feelings known, but when people thought he was addressing them in his music, they had an issue with the way in which he did it.
Two Neil Young songs appear politically motivated and were poorly met by some fans. These were ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’, which seemed to paint a generalised picture of people from those regions of America. Ronnie Van Zant, famously a proud man from Alabama, took issue with these lyrics, believing that Young took too general an approach and offended many people in the process.
“We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two,” he said, “We’re southern rebels, but more than that, we know the difference between right and wrong.”
When he spoke about those two tracks, it was clear that their meaning had been misinterpreted. While it’s easy to see how such a misinterpretation happened, given the song titles and lyrics, Young will have regretted that the point he was trying to make was lost among listeners.
When talking about the track ‘Southern Man’, Young admitted that the song was more of a commentary on the Civil Rights Movement than the South. In the liner notes for the greatest hits album, he said, “This song could have been written on a civil rights march after stopping off to watch Gone With The Wind at a local theatre.”
Similarly, when he was discussing the track ‘Alabama’, Young admitted that he wasn’t actually taking shots at the people of Alabama. “Actually, the song is more about a personal thing than it is about a state,” he said, “And I’m just using that name and that state to hide whatever it is I have to hide; I don’t know what that means.”
There was undoubtedly regret on Young’s part that the meaning of these songs was lost in translation, but it comes back to the earlier point about art. Its beauty lies in the fact we can interpret it in different ways. As such, there is a question to be asked over whether Young should have over-clarified what he was talking about with these ambiguous lyrics, or does that kill the meaning of music completely?
