When Neil Young gets angry, he gets impulsive. Mere days after the May 1970 massacre at Kent State, he had branded Richard Nixon a mass murderer; nearly 20 years later, he was redrafting George Bush Sr.'s inaugural address into a state-of-the-union screed dripping with so much bitter sarcasm, some conservatives still mistake it for an ad hoc national anthem. Those songs remain FM-radio staples to this day because their raging invectives still sting like a ripped-off bandage, decades removed from the moments that incited them. But the topical material that Neil has rush-released in recent years has turned both more lyrically obvious and musically frivolous; whether dramatizing 9/11 valor in a goofy bar-band grind or calling for Dubya's head with a cheery choral sing-along and chirpy cavalry-charge trumpets, these songs' shelf lives can be measured in weeks rather than years. As much as his legacy is tied to the politically charged tumult of the late '60s and early '70s, Neil has always been more compelling when playing the rugged, inscrutable individualist rather than the man-of-the-people populist—the urgency to get his message out tends to override the sublime lyricism and unnerving ambiguities that have yielded his most resonant, timeless work.
On his new album, Neil revisits an old pet cause: the plight of the American farmer. But 30 years after he co-founded Farm Aid to save cash-strapped field workers from foreclosure, the terms of war have changed. The Monsanto Years fixes its crosshairs on the GMO-pimping agribusiness behemoth that has a stranglehold on the world's seed (and, by extension, food) supply, forcing farmers to comply their strict terms or be litigated into destitution. And, here, the buckshot splatter extends to other entities contributing to the suppression of the average American: Wal-Mart, Chevron, Citizens United, and even Starbucks (though in the latter case, the company insists it's just an innocent bystander). But despite the dawn-summoning optimism of the opening eco anthem "A New Day for Love", The Monsanto Years is ultimately less a call to topple an evil empire than an expression of helplessness in trying to fight it. As the album trudges through its treatises on corporate bullying, compromised democracy, and environmental degradation, Neil's not so much standing up for the embattled farmer as embodying the withered voice of one.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the sound of the album hearkens back to Neil's immediate post-Harvest period, a time when the narrative concision and electric-guitar savagery of his early work was giving way to a certain fuck-it-all sloppiness and sundazed cynicism. His amped-up backing band for this set, the Promise of the Real (fronted by Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and, when performing live, Micah), never approaches the trance-inducing psychedelia of Crazy Horse, but they make for a solid Stray Gators substitute, encouraging the sort of rough'n'tumble rave-ups and slack-rock jams that defined early '70s detours like Time Fades Away. The appealing looseness of their performances proves to be the saving grace of an album too often hamstrung by heartfelt but hackneyed messaging.
While the loping, whistle-hooked "A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop" and cowpunk stomp "Workin' Man" playfully highlight the absurdity of Monsanto's strong-arm tactics, extendo-rants like "Big Box" forsake the rich characterization of Neil's most incisive social commentaries for worn-out catchphrases ("too big to fail"), broadstroked scenery ("Main Street's boarded up") and the blunt simplicity of a Change.org pitch ("people working part-time at Wal-Mart/ never get the benefits"). The album's preference for critique over craft is epitomized by the awkward ubiquity of the very word "Monsanto," which is wedged into several songs even when Neil can't be bothered to find anything to rhyme with it. (On the otherwise poignant seven-minute title track, a breezy "Mambo Sun" groove is tripped up by each utterance of the company name, delivered with all the grave weightiness of a movie villain appearing to the sound of dun-dun-dun.)
With much of the songwriting on The Monsanto Years taking the form of hastily scribbled screeds, the most revelatory moments come when Neil grapples with the paradox of making complex politics more pop-song palatable. The album's most immediately engaging track—the raggedly glorious "People Want to Hear About Love"— isn't a protest song but a song about protest songs. Sure, its call-and-response structure provides Neil with another opportunity to check off all of his key talking points: the fragility of the environment, political corruption, the link between pesticides and autism, and so on. At the same time, it shrewdly addresses those concerns within the context of a more existential dilemma: that is, in a cultural landscape craving feel-good entertainment, The Monsanto Years' brand of straight-shootin' rock'n'roll activism is going to be a tougher sell than a Pono.
