Neil Young's latest album, Living With War, was supposed to be more than a collection of protest songs. To optimistic critics of the occupation of Iraq, it heralded a tipping point -- the moment when the silent majority would finally make itself heard. One month on, as the album slides down the charts and George Bush's approval ratings climb steadily off the floor, the disappointment is deafening.
Impeach the President is not the anthem the anti-war movement has been waiting for, and Young cannot be the figurehead it needs. His proud record of conscientious objection has earned him unwaveringly loyal fans, but it also makes him an easy target, readily dismissed by Neo-Cons as an ageing Canadian hippie and a counter-cultural burnout. In the overheated climate of public opinion in the US, it is mud that sticks.
"I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up," Young told the Los Angeles Times. "I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the 1960s generation." The songs will be played live for the first time next month, by original longhairs Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
The first names on the sheet for any US peace concert would be -- with the possible exception of pop-punks Green Day -- musicians whose worldview was shaped by the Vietnam War. Bruce Springsteen (who has commented on Bush and the war to the fiftysomething audiences coming to watch him play Pete Seeger songs on his current tour), Wayne Kramer of the MC5, country singer Steve Earle, Chuck D of Public Enemy and former Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra are all old enough to have been affected by the conflict, if mostly too young to have been drafted. When Michael Stipe headlined the Bring Them Home Now gig in New York in March, he told the crowd how his father served in Korea and Vietnam when he was a child, and spoke of registering for the draft while Jimmy Carter was president. But it's been a while since any of these artists spoke directly to young people, as opposed to long-term fans.
And the majority of the bands with a young audience taking an active stance against the war lack true mass appeal. Avowed socialists such as System of a Down and Anti-Flag are so virulent in their opposition to the Bush government that they stand little chance of getting their message across to middle America. While Green Day have topped charts and won awards for their avowedly anti-war American Idiot album, they have been a commercial force for more than a decade -- the punk band it's safe to like -- and the title song probably won more fans for its exhilarating guitars than its lyrical attacks on a "redneck agenda." Other anti-war artists, such as the "freak folk" singer Devendra Banhart, are too obscure to harness the media's mobilizing power. Banhart sings his protest song Heard Somebody Say at every opportunity, but admits the refrain: "It's simple, we don't want to kill" is preaching to the converted.
"Neil Young doesn't count," he says of rock's anti-war camp. "He's a singular poet, one of the greats. He has a very secure fanbase, but they're people who grew up listening to Ohio and know what he's referencing in that song. There aren't a lot of young musicians involved from the mainstream machine, and those who have opposed the murder of innocent people have done it in a casual way, a nonchalant way, in a whispered way, and that doesn't mean shit. It's just a strategy to appease the larger and larger amount of people who are beginning to oppose this. They're not prepared to write a blatant song, so I don't feel like it's coming from a genuine place. People hint that they're against it but I don't hear it in their songs."
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