Neil Young

I just bought Neil Young's latest album, Chrome Dreams II, and while I haven't listened to it yet - there's a lot of other stuff in the stack to get through - I've already begun to notice what's becoming a recurring theme in Neil Young album reviews; something to which I'll heretofore refer as "The Neil Young Phenomenon." The blurb I just read describes this album as, to paraphrase, "the best Neil's been in years."

The problem is, as far as I can remember, every album Neil Young has put out since I've been old enough to read (seventh grade) has been described as "the best Neil's been in years." It is not possible that this can actually be true every time it's written. Neil Young puts out an album roughly every three-and-a-half weeks, each one better than he's been in years, which would mean that the new album must be better than anything in the history of recorded music, and probably since the evolution of the ear.

This is the problem with living legends: everything is judged against their entire body of work. Every album is essentially compared to the greatest hits album and, invariably, fails to live up. To overcompensate, music journalists - who love Neil Young because they're, you know, not communists - cross their fingers and hope that each new album is the next Harvest. (It's probably not.)

This is a classic dilemma for critics, because how can you objectively judge an album or a song when the whole time you're thinking, "It's alright, but it's no 'Cinnamon Girl?'" I don't think you can. Certainly I can't. So what critics do is decide how they're going to treat a living legend from here on out, and then stick to it. In Neil's case, the chosen treatment is optimistic rooting. At age 114, he's still making vital music, and for all the bluster about "the best album in years," he's basically one of the more rock-solid consistent artists out there. So I would like to introduce into the lexicon "The Neil Young Phenomenon," to describe any situation where a critic's opinion (or anyone's, for that matter) of a particular artist becomes written in stone, and every critical opinion will read the same, irrespective of the actual quality of the work.

For the record, my truncated opinions of Neil's last several albums: Living with War: alright. Prairie Wind: great. Greendale: alright. Are You Passionate?: Near-great, with the exception of the well-intentioned but hastily-written "Let's Roll." Silver and Gold: Awesome. As for the new album, I don't know when I'll get around to listening to it, but I'm looking forward to it. I hear it's a return to form, the record we've all been waiting for.