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Welcome to the very first edition of what I hope will become a regular weekday post rounding up various bits of news and entertainment I’ve found during my online travels, and various thoughts, anecdotes, trivia, and analysis pertaining thereto. What ground I’ll cover is up for grabs; there’s sure to be some socio-political content every day because that’s where I live, and likely to be plenty of stuff about music, films, etc.
While “news” will play a role, it’s not my intent to be just another copy-paste gimmick that does crappy rewrites of articles from bigger sites and passes it off as original material. Expect anything that catches my attention and inspires 250-500 words of thought, with maybe four to eight stories per day.
With that said, let’s get right in to it!
In today’s issue: Greta Thunberg reminds us that she ran out of f**ks to give about five minutes after she was born and good for her; Neil Young sings about other people; YouTube bans antivaxx misinformation. Read more using the navigation links (pro tip: the header is a drop-down menu), and don’t forget to add me on social media so you don’t miss anything!
There’s a pretty nifty little trivia-listicle over at Far Out magazine (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/neil-young-songs-wrote-about-fellow-musicians/) in the UK which lists songs Neil Young wrote about other musicians. If you’re into Young or music trivia it’s well worth scrolling through on your lunch break or whatever. Of course it’s not exhaustive, just a handful of tracks, but if you’re of a mind you can start following links and reading and learning all kinds of stuff about Young.
Of course it’s almost endemic to Neil Young that you think his songs are “about somebody,” and often their subjects are obscured through metaphor. Sometimes it’s an obvious homage (“Buffalo Springfield Again”), sometimes it’s a callback to himself (“Harvest Moon”). Sometimes he gets “feisty” ($1 Eddie Vedder, see embed) and takes on a whole idea (“This Note’s For You”), or a whole region of the country (“Southern Man”). Then there are the songs that you didn’t even realize he wrote, or about whom (“Lotta Love,” made famous by Young’s then-partner Nicolette Larson), and you could spend a lifetime speculating on the veiled references to his various interpersonal loves and hates with old bandmates like David Crosby and Stephen Stills.
Part of Young’s appeal as a songwriter is he knows how to make the specific feel general and vice-versa; he resonates, because he finds the resonance between the individual, subjective, personal experience and the collective, shared, objective “world” in which it happens.
Enjoy this fun video of Eddie Vedder inducting “Uncle Neil” into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, in 1995.