Plenty of people consider YouTube the best music site on the Web. It is featured here on most Fridays.
Yesterday, the NYT reported that YouTube unveiled YouTube Music Key, a fee-based service that will include higher-quality audio for most songs and the option of paying $8 a month for extra features, chief among them removing YouTube’s ubiquitous ads. The Wrongologist has no strong objection to paying for YouTube, as long as they don’t mess up what they already have. So here is a wish for MUSIC KEY: Please don’t screw YouTube up. That’s not asking too much, is it?
Yesterday was also Neil Percival Young’s 69th birthday. Young is an artist who has always been blatantly political, from “Ohio (Four Dead in Ohio)” recorded in 1970, to “Who’s Gonna Stand Up (and Save the Earth)” published last month.
The key to any Neil Young music is the reedy high tenor and the hammering guitar. When you can get those two with politics, so much the better. Here is his “Rockin’ In the Free World” from 1989:
“Rockin in the Free World” was written to criticize the George Bush I presidency. It is regularly covered by Pearl Jam, often in their encores. It hit #2 on the US rock charts in 1990.
Finally, “Hey, Hey, My, My”, from his “Rust Never Sleeps” album, recorded in 1991. The line from the song, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” became infamous after it was quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. Young later dedicated his 1994 album “Sleeps with Angels” to Cobain. Here is “Hey, Hey, My My“:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O1v_7T6p8U
In total, NY has 40 albums. If and/or when the Great Pumpkin welcomes Wrongo to Pearly Gates and asks: “Out of all the recording artists who ever lived, who did you listen to the most throughout every decade of your life?”
The answer will be: “Neil Young.”
