The Vision of 'Prophetic Christianity' in Neil Young: The Paradox of Divine Morality and the Evolving Ethics of Rock and Roll (Part 3)

This essay was originally produced in Dr. John Shook's seminar on Social Ethics and Religion, during the fall of 2011, in Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program.  

Transformations in popular rock music in the early 1960s reflect a spiritual diversification and religious broadening of the genre, beyond adaptations of traditional morality rooted in Christian ethics of salvation. While much scholarship on the Beatles has noted their chaotic, excessive and individualistic seriousness, moving in only a few years from outright-love pop songs like “Eight Days a Week” to the dark rapture of “Helter Skelter” and individual pursuits, Neil Young is an artist who illustrates well a prophetic Christianity, in terms of the Paradox of Divine Morality: while one higher spiritual entity is made of moral knowledge, humans can and do change their world, influence the actions of others, and are capable of doing their best, while still unequipped by any divine moral knowledge. Adherence to one principle—in Young’s case, the resolution, definition, and redemptive actions of the individual—characterizes this theological viewpoint, one that enables a physical and spiritual environment Young would define throughout his career. “The desperate confusion of issues in such rhetoric—confusion happily sown by rock n’ roll itself—hints at the way in which its counter-discourse would eventually be recuperated in the discourse of the dominant culture” (Hamm, p. 290); few have contended with the spiritual and religious ramifications that surround our “desperate confusion of issues” in the genre of popular rock music to the extent of, and with the creative voracity of, Neil Young. Attempts through popular rock music during its first formative decades worked alongside climates of social revolution and war exterior to the craft, and promoted among some musicians an embrace of transformation of spiritual thought and social ethics: for Young, the ability to pose questions of identity, ethical action, and soteriology through his recordings and productions  has remained a clear characteristic of his creative output.

Neil Young moved from Canada to California in 1966, and after his group Buffalo Springfield found commercial success, began his solo career in 1968; his first solo album included the song “The Loner,” a statement of individualism and empiricism, one in which attainment of knowledge is the sole ultimate truth available to the alienated:

He's a perfect stranger,

Like a cross of himself and a fox.

He's a feeling arranger and a changer

Of the ways he talks.

He's the unforeseen danger

The keeper of the key to the locks.

Know when you see him,

Nothing can free him.

Step aside, open wide,

It's the loner (Young, “The Loner,” 1968).

Neil Young’s popularity through the 1970s was due in part to his lyrical reflection of a loss of hope following the revolutions and change of the 1960s: like the metaphorical Loner described above in one of Young’s earliest solo successes, Everybody Knows this is Nowhere (1969) and After the Gold Rush (1970) established his unique upper range as epitomizing the crestfallen idealists, whose actions for social change appeared to result in only the continuation of a military conflict overseas but in physical violence at protests in the United States (Young wrote “Ohio” in response to the tragedy at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970). Himself the “unforeseen danger” (Young, “The Loner,” 1968) to emerging standards of categorization in popular and rock music, Young explored country music (Harvest, 1972), bleak Americana in response to tragedies of substance abuse (Tonight’s the Night, 1975), and later, rallying cries to revolt, against systems of oppression (Freedom, 1989). In the early 1980s, after the production of two experimental albums in Re ac tor (1981) and Trans (1982), Young was sued by his label for releasing Everybody’s Rockin, a 28-minute authentic rockabilly release: Geffen’s litigation claimed Young had deliberately made a recording that was “unrepresentative” of himself (“Neil Young,” 2011)—a self-described “feeling arranger and a changer/of the way he talks” (Young, “The Loner,” 1968).

God appears little, if ever, in Young’s early work, and by 1979 his hard rock sound had gained a new allegiance of punk rock, and later grunge, performers: introducing new material through the release of concert recordings, Young’s song “Hey Hey My My,” on Live Rust (1979).

My my, hey hey

Rock and roll is here to stay

It’s better to burn out

Than to fade away

My my, hey hey

Out of the blue and into the black

They give you this but you paid for that

And once you’re gone you can never come back […]

It’s better to burn out

Than it is to rust

The king is gone

but he’s not forgotten (Young, “Hey Hey My My,” 1979).

These sorrowful lyrics were famously repeated in the suicide note of Kurt Cobain, songwriter and front man for Nirvana; as individuals making choices to burn out or fade, rust or disappear, a universal and ethical autonomy is available to all, without crossing any bridges of salvation. While the nihilism inherent in desiring to “burn out” over ‘rusting’ into an unconscious oblivion, this dark ode (an acoustic and electric version are both presented on Live Rust) may reflect and further define Young’s classification as espousing a prophetic Christianity, one in which paths to faith in higher spiritual entities than oneself results in being no more enabled by the attainment of a greater moral wisdom. Memories, of ‘kings’ and what had once been paid for, may or may not continue and spiral forward with us; regardless of memory, humanity’s movement is one that is “out of the blue and into the black,” an ever-present situation of ethics that one must contend with, while specifically lacking any knowledge from above.

John Dewey’s ideal human action in relation to one’s social ethics and religious nature is appropriate in examining Young’s ‘prophetic’ spirituality: “Religious faith is the affirmation that God’s activity is identical with one’s own activity, uniting what only seems separate from the perspective of those unable to find their true selves. Only those who assume that they are self-sufficient and separate beings would view God as a distant, external authority over morality and a forceful, mechanical power over nature” (Shook, 2000, p. 149). Neil Young’s action and participation in the establishment and revision of social ethics is important in this regard; through this lens established by Dewey, Young’s co-founding of Farm Aid in 1985, his public political and anti-war statements (including the 2006 album Living With War and the song “Let’s Impeach the President”), his advocacy for bio-diesel fuel, and his 2008 electric car project and accompanying album (LincVolt, 2008). These social interactions are critical to affirming Young’s spirituality as representing a prophetic Christianity, one in which an individual’s actions toward establishing a common good are essential, as humanity is responsible for the creation of its own ethics.

Following a brain aneurism in the late 1990s, Neil Young described his faith in a conversation with television host Charlie Rose: “I have faith. I don’t know what it’s in. I believe in nature; I love nature. My church is my forest. To me, that’s my church, that’s my cathedral […] I have faith, and I respect faith” (Young, as cited by Rose, 2008). These reflections, alongside the lyrics of his song “When God Made Me” from his 2005 Prairie Wind album, help fully characterize Young’s theological stance as ever built of reverent questions:

Was he thinking about my country, or the colour of my skin?
Was he thinking about my religion, and the way I worshipped him?
Did he create just me in his image, or every living thing?
When God made me.
When God made me.
Was he planning only for believers, or for those who just had faith?
Did he envision all wars that were fought in his name?
Did he say there was only one way to be close to him? (Young, “When God Made Me,” 2005).

Young’s religious nature comes in the empowerment and liberation through reconceptualization of every individual; it is what Dewey named the “actual religious quality in the experience” (p. 14) that is critical to one’s ethics. Acknowledging creation by a higher power, Young’s religious and philosophical statement stops short of describing the participation of God in the human realm: what was God thinking, and what was his larger plan? Young’s posing of the poetic and unanswerable comes in an environment where definitions of “God” were already oppositional and proprietary among denominations in the Christian church: Langerak’s characterization of John Locke’s view on religious toleration seems appropriate as well to Young, as both seem “not one to celebrate diversity; he merely argued the irrationality of not enduring it” (in Taliaferro and Griffiths, 2003, p. 454). Young’s song “When God Made Me”(2005) does not assert exclusive knowledge or metaphysical insight, but rather identifies—or verifies—the existence of these inconceivable dilemmas. Describing a notion of ethical and individual harmonization found in Dewey, Shook (2000) defines a human process of the instillation of meaning into experience and a reality based on our realizations: “the successful harmonization of known things is the process of verification. In this process two occurrences stand out. First, objects which were known are known no longer in the same way because things have new meanings. Second, new known objects have been created […] verification is always a process of learning. As things acquire new, better meanings, old facts are eliminated, and new facts are created” (Shook, 2000, p. 174). Young’s vision of spirituality and actions of social change help define his reverence for a God that allows individuals to deliver to their experiences a sense of meaning and valuation; for Neil Young, his prophetic derivation of the Paradox of Divine Morality has been a prolific and interdisciplinary one, seeking to enable change and improvement in the social condition, regardless of any lack of knowledge about God’s sense of right and wrong. 

For citations, please view http://www.commontimevt.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-paradox-of-divine-morality-and.html