In the early 1970’s Neil Young’s music – a kind of post-hippie intellectual folk rock tinged with southern country – represented exactly how a lot of U.S. youth was feeling as the Vietnam War was drawing to its sad conclusion. There was an almost unimaginable cultural gap between that sound (a hard-fought return away from psychedelia to a kind of post-Beatles roots music) and the earlier aesthetic of Broadway musicals.<\/p>\n
By the time Young was recording, many waves of successive cultural upheaval had left their mark in the mere fifteen years since the songs of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady<\/i> had swept to the top of the pop charts. After the British invasion of 1963, it would become progressively harder for a Broadway musical to produce even one hit song, let alone a whole slew of them.<\/p>\n
By the early 1970s, the entire aesthetic that had created the classic Broadway musical had been rejected by a new youth generation. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser – all of whom had recently been towering figures in the popular culture – were regarded as irrelevant or worse, cultural stooges of a discredited older generation that now stood for Richard Nixon and a reviled war in east Asia.<\/p>\n
And yet two of Neil Young’s most popular songs: Heart of Gold<\/i> and I Believe in You<\/i>, have identical titles to two songs from Frank Loesser’s 1961 How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying<\/i> – a Broadway musical that was the very epitome of the older aesthetic.<\/p>\n
Well ok, one song title could easily be a coincidence. But two<\/i>? To quote Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest<\/i> (upon finding out that her prospective son-in-law is an orphan): “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.”<\/p>\n
So is it really possible that there was some utterly wild coincidence at work here? Or was Mr. Young just possibly having a little post-modern fun?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the early 1970’s Neil Young’s music – a kind of post-hippie intellectual folk rock tinged with southern country – represented exactly how a lot of U.S. youth was feeling as the Vietnam War was drawing to its sad conclusion. There was an almost unimaginable cultural gap between that sound (a hard-fought return away from … Continue reading “The Great Neil Young Mystery”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}