There's a pretty good article from a couple years ago (on the
American Prospect ) which I think sums up Mr. Young rather well: "It is the politics of the wet middle finger held in the air to gauge the breeze."
I don't know that he necessarily has become more conservative. He has seen the needle and the damage done but doesn't really want to escape the culture which enables it. He flirted with what have been derided as "reactionary politics" but I think his politics remain much more socialist than most. I applaud him for his chartible works and do wish that more performers would embrace causes and institutions that actually make a difference and aren't just ideological movements.
I've been a fan of his music through the good and bad (anyone remember "Sample and Hold" from
Trans or the entire
Time Fades Away thing). I guess I'm disappointed (especially since he was instructing Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam to lay off the on-stage Bush-bashing a couple years ago) but not too surprised. He was a grandfather figure to the grunge scene and since that bandwagon has mercifully been put to rest he is just pandering and struggling to remain relative to a new generation of "rebels". I guess I'm probably looking at the new record with the same sense of deflation that accompanied the last Steve Earle piece of crap. Too bad- there was a time when each put out some great music...
Interesting. I as well am a big Steve Earle and Neil Young fan. Steve nowadays just reminds me of a pissed off old man looking for something to rebel against, deciding it is too hard to find anything of note, so just settling down with some leftist cant. His earlier stuff was phenomenal, when he was just a drugged out white trash outlaw in a race between whether he could drink himself to death or o.d. first. Reminded me of myself in my very young days, but he definitely caught the zeittgeist of that slice of culture. If you are into that, you might try the Drive By Truckers and Southern Culture on the Skids. I know some of the guys in SCOTS personally, and they are super people.