Search and destroy: Neil Young

"I mean, it really really sounds just like the Alan Parsons Project! Isn't it obvious?"

"Mmm-hmm. Who are you trying to convince, ums; me...or you?"

i feel like these songs are about as good as you can expect from a band that called themselves "america." i mean, "america"? really?

and yeah i guess "horse with no name" splits the difference between CSNY and "Harvest"

you know what song is awesome is ventura highway

that one is good!
oddly enough, lucinda williams sings about neil young in her song "ventura"

I don't rate "Heart of Gold" any higher than "A Horse with No Name," although it was cool when Janet Jackson interpolated "Ventura Highway" in 2001.

just saw this, looks cool, though I think i've heard it all before: http://www.willardswormholes.com/archives/31498

!!!

That looks amazing.

yea despite its many terrible qualities i do really enjoy "horse with no name"

i do not turn it off when it comes on the radio.
the "born to run" on that deluxe ragged glory is one of neil's better lost songs ... and it is not a springsteen cover.

Man "A Horse With No Name" is weaker, weaker than the weaker Neil song. "Heart of Gold" may be overplayed but it has more poetry and meaning in one line than "AHWNN" does in the entire song. Just stupid lyrics. Stupid stupid stupid.

The lyrics have all the weight and meaning of an astrology chart.

on some level, yeah, "horse" is weaker than "gold." but if I want "poetry and meaning" I can name 50+ neil songs i'd rather go to - relative to the rest of his career, "Heart Of Gold" is a coffee jingle. when i want to hear a jingle, i'd prefer "horse"'s cosmic inanity.

randy newman said something like "it sounds like a kid who thinks he's taken lsd" which is farrr more novel on top 40 than a country-pop song about looking for love in all the wrong places

Man "A Horse With No Name" is weaker, weaker than the weaker Neil song. "Heart of Gold" may be overplayed but it has more poetry and meaning in one line than "AHWNN" does in the entire song. Just stupid lyrics. Stupid stupid stupid.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), F

the Young song is pretty dumb though. Nice harmonica and "and I'm gettin' old" though.

gold has nice slide from ben keith too

yeah "heart of gold," lyrically anyway, is lite neil, bu it's a beautiful little shuffle of a song.

It was a huge hit that paid for his next few albums, for which I'm grateful.

my apologies if anyone here is their age, but i think most of us are also dealing with a hindsight awareness of neil's whole vibe. let's not forget "sugar mountain" was a b-side until the late '70s.

― da croupier, Friday, March 20, 2015 12:28 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I'm not as old, but old enough to remember that neil's whole vibe showed up pretty quickly. If he'd started talking about LinkVolt or PONO during a perfunctory Buffalo Springfield interview on The Ed Sullivan Show or American Bandstand, would have seemed right in character.

"heart of gold" is very good. "horse with no name" is very bad. reformulating or complicating this is try-hard freshman-level challops.

"Horse With No Name" feels like the equivalent of those pop folk songs with banjos and suspenders nowadays. The production is totally kick-ass, I do enjoy that early 70s close-mic room sound. But you can see why someone who played in Buffalo Springfield like 10 years ago thought they were posers.

Randy Newnan rules, I wish he and Neil would do an album together.

Newman

"Horse With No Name" feels like the equivalent of those pop folk songs with banjos and suspenders nowadays

otm

"There were plants and birds and rocks and things" is in its way a hilariously great lyric

don't care much for America but "Sister Golden Hair" is a nonsensical trifle that I love

"i don't know man / it was a desert / who gives a fuck / lalalalala-la"

The ocean is a desert with it's life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love

I have a hard time ignoring the lyrics, they are exactly what poseur hippies say. "I've been to the desert/in the desert you can remember your name". Neil Young was more subtle in his writing, he might sing about mountains and stuff but it is with prettier words than "Plants and birds and rocks and trees". I guess you could make a case for it being raw and unschooled but the performance is too whispery and light to come across with any vitality at all. The song doesn't develop anywhere. It's like a catalog of things you see in a landscape, it's just a bunch of descriptions, floating in space. Some hippie thinking he's spiritual and telling you about it.

"Heart of Gold" has this awesome folk song structure and it uses repetition ("I wanna live"/"i wanna give") to that end. It doesn't have clunkers like "Plants and birds and rocks and trees", relying not on telling the audience but showing them. He is a miner, his heart is gold. There are implied metaphors and relationships. As the song progresses he doesn't rely on description so much as comparison/contrast. Things happen, he travels, he experiences things that are actually pretty vague, and uses folk repetition of the "Heart of Gold". We come back to the title of the song, the metaphor that everyone probably can relate to (hence the song's massive popularity).

These new experiences describe the theme Heart of Gold. Which is basically whatever the listener wants to decide for themselves. It is a metaphor that must be arrived at by the listener. By juxtapositioning the "Redwoods"/"Hollywood"/"cross(ing) the oceans" with this theme Neil Young is engaging the listener in the act of creating meaning.

Oh another part of "Horse" is basically it is someone just aimlessly wandering. Trying to remember his name. It is a celebration of laziness. "Heart of Gold" is at least in someway about "a miner" whose work is never done. This is why Neil Young was a revolutionary and America was corporate rock.

oh that's why

or could it not be that america was giving a truer account of what it was to be young & fucked-up, without the capacity to formulate coherent thoughts, while neil simply cloaked his lady issues in the vain trappings of the protestant work ethic

I should hate "A Horse with No Name"--any Neil fan should--but as quasi-drug Top-40 silliness, I think it's funnier than "Puff the Magic Dragon" and more atmospheric than "One Toke Over the Line." And I have the advantage of first hearing it when I was 11.

"Sister Golden Hair"'s their best, though.

i totally grant that "horse" is insubstantial hippie poseur fluff but i still enjoy hearing it and it is so amusing and enjoyable on many levels

i mean crosby's "MUSIC IS LUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHVVE" from "if could only remember my name" is also insubstantial hippie (not poseur to be sure though) fluff too you know and i also love that

DC otm.

Yes I prefer David Crosby if we're talking 70s caveman stoner folk rock.

Aside from the lyrics "Horse With No Name" does not rock. It sounds like muzak.

What is the other America stuff like? I'd imagine lots of folk blueshammer.

Oh wow I am listening to "I Need You" it is like Harry Nilsson watered down and spun off into a successful 80s soft rock career. Nice arrangements and singing tho!

they worked a lot with George Martin. they have a pretty good song about the wizard of oz. i like america.

ugh u wanna talk bad lyrics

and oz didn't give nothin 2 the tin man

that he didn't

didn't allllllready have

"There were plants and birds and rocks and things" is in its way a hilariously great lyric

― totally unachievable goals and no incentive to compromise (Sparkle Motion),

oh like Neil's above this shit

This is why Neil Young was a revolutionary and America was corporate rock.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau),

is "Adam Bruneau" a pseudonym for "Jann Wenner"?

oh like Neil's above this shit
hey now

the Y in the biggest corporate rock band of the early and mid seventies wrote six dozen great better than "A Horse With No Name," so America should feel grateful that Neil Young finally wrote something at their level.

ok lol @ neil young as revolutionary

I'm sure there were bigger corporate rock bands at the time (I know how to measure "bigger," not as sure how to determine "corporate"). Chicago, for one, comes to mind.

if we're talking size and GDP and per capita income Europe and Asia were bigger.