Ragged Unintentional Glory
Here, the story and the setting give [Neil] Young a hook for the record, a common theme that he can rally around, and the album benefits so much from that focus that it doesn’t really matter that the story is convoluted beyond comprehension; the plot matters so much that it winds up not mattering at all. Close attention and repeated listens offer few rewards to the careful listener, because Young doesn’t really say much of anything here, no matter how elaborately he says it. Learning more about the narrative — whether it’s through the simultaneously released DVD of the Young-directed film Greendale, hearing his rambling on-stage between-song narratives, or reading apparent transcriptions of these ramblings in the liner notes — illuminates the story slightly, even as declarations like “When I was writing this I had no idea what I was doing, so I was just as surprised as you are” emphasize the suspicion that there’s not much meaning in the whole enterprise. All this doesn’t really matter because Greendale works as a record — it ebbs and flows and it holds together, playing as a unified whole on a level he hasn’t approached since Ragged Glory. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine
An excerpt from Erlewine’s review of Neil Young’s Greendale on allmusic.com. And oh what a favorite issue he raises! To give Erlewine his due, Young did go on and on about the plot in his concerts, supposedly, without enlightening his audiences much. So what about that increasingly anachronistic object, the concept album, when the artist himself doesn’t understand the concept? What about program music?
I’m not much for lyrics. To tell the truth, half the time I can’t hear them anyhow. I’d start to worry if there weren’t websites devoted to giving us “revved up like a deuce, a motor rotor in the night” and the like. So a song that depends on subtlety of lyrics is going to have to snag me musically first, long enough to get me curious about the lyrics (and I have to say, sometimes what I think the lyrics are is a lot better than what they turn out to be). The whole form of the song — an object we listen to in a fixed time — encourages artists to stretch meaning out. Listeners’ brains can be relied on to fill in the implicit links in “crop circles in the carpet” as the song goes by.
All of this is to say, artistic intention — at least insofar as it shows up in lyrics — doesn’t cut much ice with me. Whatever you intended, Mr. Artist, there the thing is, and I’ve got to deal with it the way it shows up at my door. Besides, I listen to music in too strange a way (reconstructing the score in my head) to have time for Beethoven’s babbling brooks and Schubert’s splashing fish. Worse, I’ve seen the Hartmann pictures that inspired Mussorgsky, and to me they wouldn’t have inspired a good spit.
Oh, I hear Grofé’s thunderstorm, but I get a bigger grin out of the harmony under the beginning of that last reprise of the theme. And I worry that the folks who listen too much to what Grofé is doing are missing how he’s doing it (in part by being a hero to the viola players). That’s a good little piece of writing there.
Let’s pause here with a question about Neil Young (remember him?) and his intentions for Greendale. Is his discourse about the plot in his concerts an attempt to keep working on the songs? Or is it a part of the total piece of art? Or is it simply talking to the audience, whose company he enjoys?