Young's excitement on the new album is real. It recalls his commitment to movements like No Nukes in the late seventies or Farm Aid a decade later. On "The Monsanto Years" the old rocker rages against everything and everyone, is not afraid to name names. The most prominent are Monsanto and Starbucks. "Monsanto and Starbucks: Mothers want to know what they feed their children" is one of the words in the song "A Rock Star Bucks A Coffee Shop".
Not only on the new record Neil Young loves to assume the position of a simple man who looks critically at the powerful man's fingers. In November, the bard turns 70 and no longer triggers the hurricanes he conjured up with "Like A Hurricane". His voice got thin, his hair thinning. He is aware of his own weakness and does not try to make up for it with production cosmetics, as a David Coverdale does when he lets himself fall back into glorious Purple times with the twentieth infusion of Whitesnake. "Here I stand, I can't help myself, God help me," Martin Luther is said to have said at the Reichstag in Worms, and Neil Young is also building up in front of the big corporations, knowing that he can't do anything about it.
But at least he's letting his anger run wild.
