I have no connection to Neil Young: I didn’t listen to him growing up, my family didn’t, my friends didn’t, and generally speaking, I’m not keen on country music; it reeks of piss-stained old people, simple-minded rural folk, and unwashed hippies. But After the Gold Rush seems to be so universally well-regarded that I felt I had to at least give it a try. Christ. It’s boring as all hell. Deducing lyrical themes for structuring this review proved difficult because the words are so utterly insubstantial and insipid. I suppose the musical tone is relatively innocuous and unobtrusive, so it could be considered fairly listenable and acceptable as background music, but this slight saving grace is obviated by Neil’s unignorably irritating vocals.
In fact, after listening to this album, I found myself not only utterly perplexed as to why people like it but, indeed, increasingly uncertain about the overall project of reviewing classic rock music from the 60s and 70s, as so much of it seems to be overrated tripe. Why do people like this, actually? Is it mainly autistic male guitar perverts fawning over Neil’s “playing”, or middle-aged Americans bewitched by the album’s sappy countryfied aura and songs about canal boats? Both of these (by no means mutually exclusive) demographics are perfectly entitled to their opinions, of course, even if they are all tossrags of the absolute lowest order.
Anyway, after that diatribe about the baby boomers and their dying, dogshit culture, I’m honestly struggling to think of what to write next, how to thematically order a review of an album that left me so utterly cold and made such a minimal impact on me, apart from an abiding irritation over Neil’s godawful singing. There’s little to be said about the music; it’s folk, country, gentle acoustic guitar and piano. It is completely and utterly anodyne. I’m not always opposed to music of this kind – there’s a place in my heart for chilled out, slightly melancholy country, in small doses – but the melodies and arrangements on this album I find largely unimaginative and forgettable, especially for an album that’s universally well regarded.
I’ve heard it said that the air of resigned, rather lifeless sadness which characterises After the Gold Rush is – like the album’s title – intended to evoke the end of the optimistic, revolutionary 60s and the beginning of the depressed, decadent 70s. But in my opinion, such a judgement invests the sound of this album with more significance than it deserves. To me, it is simply boring, languid, unremarkable – perhaps an agreeable listening experience if you’re on smack, in which case you should be locked up like in Mao’s China, you malodorous fuck.
The overall air of indistinct mushiness, the lack of bite and sharpness, is also a feature of the album’s largely unintelligible lyrics. Dr Seuss wouldn’t have gotten away with the sub-Cat in the Hat cack of the words to “Tell Me Why”, the album’s opener. Neil Young himself admitted to not knowing what most of the songs were about, as if that’s somehow acceptable, even commendable, an indication of the album’s Jungian mystique and connection to a broader cultural subconscious.
This brings us to one of the most risible developments in the history of rock music, which became particularly pronounced from the mid-60s and which, in my opinion, we largely owe to the “consciousness-expanding” pretentions of the hippy generation. I am referring to the unforgivable tendency toward what Lou Reed referred to as “West Coast stupidity” – the acceptance of meaningless, free associative lyrics that come directly out of the artist’s pen without any conscious thought behind them, but which sound somehow suggestive and meaningful, as if the voice and the words are but another instrument, contributing to the melody and overall colour of the song.
Nein – lyrics and vocals are, or should be, a song’s intellect, providing a cerebral contrast to the emotional backdrop of the music. Rock’s indulgence of such idiocy is its most egregious sin, one committed much less frequently by rap and pop, with their professionally and coldly conceived lyrical arrangements. Neil Young was deeply incriminated in the reprehensible trend I am describing, and After the Gold Rush is positively replete with half-witted stream-of-consciousness nonsense, a grim and sobering reminder of the intellectual mediocrity of most professional musicians.
There are, I suppose, a couple of songs on After the Gold Rush with some brains – like the title track, if you can tolerate the (even by Neil’s standards) unusually whiney vocals. The lyrics hint at a vaguely interesting, probably heroin-induced fever dream, with the verses invoking particular phases of human history and pointing to the ultimate necessity of abandoning planet earth in “silver spaceships” due to – presumably – some kind of impending ecological disaster, the familiar and tiresome bogeyman of the surviving hippies of the 1970s (incidentally, just look at how the hysterical concerns and obsessions of the 60s counter-culture have come to infiltrate the mainstream).
“Southern Man”, for example, offers an uncharacteristically cohesive slice of social commentary and it’s probably the album’s best song, a doleful indictment of the Deep South and its failure to adapt to the changes wrought by the Civil Rights movement. Ominous references to “crosses burning”, admonitions to Southern Whites to adhere to the true principals of their “good book”, are welcome indeed after the inchoate mush we’ve thus far been subjected to. And “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” is an interesting premonition of the urban decay that would consume America’s cities during the 1970s, as well as a tentative historical contextualization of it. “It’s only castles burning” sings (squeals) Neil, thereby touching on the fact that history is full of rising and falling civilisations, and that, to some observers, the US in the 1970s seemed to be on a downward trajectory.
But this is meagre fare indeed, a smattering of half-thought-through lyrics on an album of indistinct doggerel. An air of resigned sadness at this juncture in the cultural history of the West could’ve been compelling, but that’s not what I hear on After the Gold Rush, which is characterised more by a boring and pallid lifelessness, the zonked out pseudo-intellectualism of the teenage pot smoker, or even the barely conscious indifference that permeates the average opium den. From this point of view, maybe the album is interesting as a historical record of how the fire went out of the counterculture, which dissipated into the wearily blissed-out communes of the Californian foothills and resurfaced to rock the boat only in occasional moments of clear-headed anger (much like on this album, which rouses itself from its stupor only on “Southern Man”). All well and good. But do I want to listen to it? I’d rather listen to Mark Kozelek, and I don’t say that lightly.
3/10
Highlights: “Southern Man”, “Don’t Let it Bring You Down”