Pussycat Dolls, Kelly Clarkson, Rhyddian. It’s hard to find anything to fault in the impeccable body of work they have produced in recent years. Occasionally one has a slight niggle that they should be trying more to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. For example they haven’t really chosen to use their awesome talents to interpret the recent wars and the environmental crisis is only reflected obliquely in their oeuvre. Maybe they want to reflect and put things in an historical context rather than rush to glib easy answers.

Compare this to Neil Young. There is nothing a grumpy old man loves more than something to get really cross about and his contempt for George Bush and fierce opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reinvigorated him musically and politically. He runs an anti-war website, recorded an an anti-war album and did an anti-war tour. Not much room for doubt there.

Having seen off Dubya Neil has turned his attention to the environmental situation. He’s got history here. His 1989 song Rockin’ in the Free World complained of the damage to the ozone layer caused by Styrofoam boxes and was almost certainly instrumental in getting the ban on CFCs. Neil is persuaded by the evidence on anthropomorphic climate change and has recorded an album dealing with it. The link for the video for the first single is below and is rather good though there are reports that some of the songs have been described as his worst ever. Even his best friends can’t deny he’s had more than his share of duffs.

Car have a big part in Neil’s songs and biography but he is coming to terms with the fact that they are environmentally destructive and this presents a quandary. On the one hand they symbolise freedom, movement and blue collar America. On the other hand they are making the planet uninhabitable. How does one express this in song? More importantly how does one craft a lyric setting out the need to challenge capitalist manufacturing and poductivism while at the same time retaining skilled unionised jobs for carworkers during a deep capitalist recession?

Then the whole world started running out of money

People losing their jobs

Right here in Wichita

Neil Young’s solution is to present the dilemma in a song in which the character of his engineer, Johnny Magic, adapts his Continental to run on – and here it becomes apparent that neither songsmith nor metalsmith have been keeping up to date with the debate on biofuels –

She was born to run on a Proud Highway
Now she goes long range on domestic green fuel
100 miles per gallon is the Continental Rule

The big positive here is that they have worked out the link between petrol and carbon dioxide. The hiccup is that the link between food for people and fuel remains misty. If only Neil had checked out  Climate and Capitalism or read Socialist Resistance more often he wouldn’t have made such a screaming howler.

We have reason to be confident that he may get round to that. The lyric shows that he is starting to see the need for political action to prevent climate change.

The Motor-Head Messiah went to Washington
To show them what he’d done
The senators and congressmen came down
In Washington
And they rode in the heavy metal Continental

Here we have the artist as harbinger of the change in mass consciousness and we need to see this work as a stage in the development in the understanding of the issues. He’s come up with a pro-working class solution and wants to engage in direct action in the seat of government. We know he’s a big model train fan and can be sure that is next album will take up the need for a socially owned free railway system.

In the short interview he discusses his take on cars and his part in the search for new ways of making them go.