So, um, Neil Young wrote a song about the bailout.
Well, sort of. It's also about getting fat and driving a big rig. And manicures. And blogging. The man who wrote "Ohio" — one of the most biting protest songs rock 'n' roll has ever offered — whose emotive tenor voice helped thousands of young baby boomers struggling to understand their country, is now writing lyrics about his flat-screen TV. "Got it repo'd now," he sings in a video he posted to the Huffington Post. "Missed the Raiders game."
The song, "Fork in the Road," is allegedly the title track from a forthcoming album, and its home-movie-quality video features Young wearing headphones plugged into an apple (oh, he is so clever) and moving around in quasi-dance motions like an aging hippie rocking out to the same classic jam he's been listening to for the past four decades.
To be fair, it's hard to write music about the economy. No one has ever come out with a great "Invisible Hand" anthem or a theme song about price elasticity and wage rates. But that doesn't stop Young from trying; parts of his 2008 world-tour concerts were peppered with angry rants about the financial collapse. In November he even released his own plan for saving the U.S. auto industry. Young aimed to tackle "the issue of global warming from our automobiles while enhancing our national security and keeping Detroit working." Wow, did the Woodstock generation get boring, or what?
Neil Young has never been one for lyrics — he's doing well if he can work a three-syllable word into a melody — but even he has standards, and they usually don't allow for lyrics like "Download this, it sounds like s___."
I bet my dad will really like this.