The Vocoder and the Damage Done
On Neil Young's most adventurous album, and an examination of his supreme artistry
Neil Young has been producing music in seven separate decades at this point in his life. Few musicians can match his sheer productivity, but quantity does not come with a dearth of quality. He’s called the “Godfather of Grunge” because he is perhaps the single most influential artist on the ‘90s alt-rock boom that ignited with the releases of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger in late 1991. Particularly, I’d say his sound in the late ‘70s, when he was really in his full artistic bloom after slowly transitioning from the folksy, hazy breeding grounds of the ‘60s and the Flower Power protest song scene, is the fertilizer in which the germ of the early ‘90s grew the most easily. If you wanted an even more specific distillation, you could probably find it in American Stars ‘n Bars and Rust Never Sleeps, but his entire pre-1980 catalog is the stuff of legends.
Any artist with the amount of material over any long period of time will have a choice to make. They can keep mining the same vein and hope they can riff on it enough not to be accused of making the same album over and over and over again. AC/DC is the classic example of a group that lost all its artistic drive and just kept fucking the same chicken over and over and over again. After Bon Scott died, the band hired Brian Johnson, made one pantheon album in Back in Black, and then decided they were going to plant their flags into the ground around them and never move forward again. For a band whose early discography is so vibrant, relevant, essential, it’s hilarious to see all of that great work forgotten because they became the ultimate bar band only with a superstar’s income. It’s not to say all the songs they wrote after Back in Black are bad. It’s just the hit rate was so dire compared to their early career. Songs like “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” and “Thunderstruck” are butt-rock staples that are just surrounded by a sea of development arrested by design.
Neil Young didn’t rest on his laurels. He began to move into weird, extreme directions. The 1980s are not looked upon as his kindest decade, and although I don’t think they should be either, it’s not like he stopped trying. There’s more creative drive and ambition in Trans than in some artists’ careers. Artists make left turns all the time to varying degrees of success anyway. Radiohead is the most obvious example, and they became superstars after shifting away from their take on grungy post-punk into more avant garde presentations of music. Execution and hitting a zeitgeist have a lot to do with whether your big swerve is going to be critically and commercially accepted. It also helps when their two albums before Kid A were The Bends and OK Computer.
Before Trans hit, Young, according to more than a few of his fans and critics, fell off a cliff from the iconic Rust Never Sleeps. Hawks and Doves immediately followed in 1980, which continued Young’s inward trajectory into more pastoral, classic country sounds. As someone who always wore his influences from Hank Williams on his sleeve, this was his first album that really sounded closer to what you’d find in Nashville rather than New York, but something felt missing. Maybe it was authenticity, maybe it was the energy he had from recording and touring and playing the role of activist for 15 years prior. Sometimes, artists just lose their fastball for a little while. When the sample size gets too large, the odds one produces a clunker goes up. It shouldn’t reflect any worse on Young’s total output than “Wonderful Christmastime” does on Paul McCartney’s. But that’s neither here nor there.
His next album felt like another course correction, back to what he was doing before Hawks and Doves. Re•Ac•Tor stripped everything but distortion and heaviness, but divorced of any of his career context, it was not a bad album, per se. Young is the forgotten guitar god, someone who commands a ton of respect in music but for things like songwriting. It feels like only other guitar players talk him up in the same class as Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Beck or Tony Iommi. The problem comes in with some of the themes. Young’s bona fides have never been questioned given his beginnings in Buffalo Springfield, the arch-protest band, which is why some of the content on Re•Ac•Tor felt out of place, specifically the song “Motor City,” which is a paean against imports and glorifying the auto industry in Detroit. It’s not a terrible sentiment, which I guess if you’re going to have a boomer mask-off moment, having it in an area where the American poor might be able to benefit isn’t the worst. Still, for someone who has written about preserving nature’s beauty so many times before and after this album, it was probably jarring for a music critic with a certain image of Young in his mind.
That sets the stage for Trans. The early ‘80s were a weird time in popular music. Disco was dead maybe two years, and the demise of its audio debauchery left a void in pop music, similar to how prog rock bands eating themselves in their own ornate excesses opened the door for other subgenres of rock music to take hold. Just as punk scrubbed pageantry of prog rock out with simplicity of three chords and anger, popular music started to see infiltration from electronic music, which had been building momentum in Europe in the prior decade. Brian Eno and Kraftwerk were at the forefront of creating an artistic movement. Those lush and futuristic sounds cut a clear path across the cocaine and the shards of destroyed mirror balls at disco halls everywhere. The pop music of the ‘80s rarely reached the artistic heights of their forebears, but the melodic application of those sounds and concepts made for one of the most interesting decades in popular music ever.
Young loves music; he always has. It’s reflected in his music across the years, so it makes sense that he would jump on a trend and jump on it early. That’s where Trans comes in. It’s a weird record, sure. The tones are washed with synthesizers, the instrument that defined the ‘80s more than anything else outside of the keytar, perhaps. On the surface, one could be forgiven if they thought it was a cheap attempt at cashing in, until that person realizes that record released in 1982, which was around the time the first pop acts were hitting big and when Eno was working with cutting edge acts like The Talking Heads. But there was one thing on the record that might’ve signified that Young may not have known entirely what he was doing.
The fucking voice modulator.
At least half the tracks have his voice run through a modulator that made him sound like a robot, like a robot from a terrible sci-fi movie from decades prior. It’s almost parody, like what someone who was born in the ‘40s and who lived through the rustic and pastoral psychedelia of ‘60s and ‘70s thought the future sounded like instead of realizing it was the present. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding that feels like something a music critic circa 1982 would get incredibly offended at. With the distance of time, it doesn’t seem so bad, and I couldn’t tell you how severe the blowback from it could be at the time since I was a year old at the time.
But the thing is, all the poor reviews from that time1 missed the forest for the trees. It wasn’t mockery or a cheap grab at relevance from someone who didn’t understand what he was dealing with. But at heart, it’s a great record because it’s a Neil Young record. He doesn’t misunderstand what the assignment was. He took some new toys that had come into his wheelhouse, and he used them. He used the Vocoder badly, sure, but that’s one element. Musically, the album has layered melodies and great instrumentation and all the things that made the music he made in the prior two decades and what he would make in the next one.
Trans was actually ahead of its time. While ‘80s excess wasn’t the same as disco, there was just as severe a reaction to it in the form of grunge, gangsta rap, and the more modern hip-hop movement altogether. Synthesizers and electronic influences were rejected, but just as everything old made a comeback at some point, the love for the aesthetic that made ‘80s music so… ‘80s was much stronger than any other revival from the ‘70s and before that happened in the ‘90s. Nearly every culturally relevant rock band in the last 10-12 years has incorporated some element of electronic-influenced music into their artistry. If anything, Trans was ahead of its time, which is par for the course for Young. Again, there are few people who have ever lived on this planet who have loved music the way Young even still does. He shot for a target, but it was further down the line than what people expected.
I have to wonder if that reaction caused him to record Everybody’s Rockin’, which dove as far into the past as Trans jumped into the future. The 1950s revivalism was laid on thicc, such as that it was hard to tell whether it was an earnest exploration of the music of Young’s youth or an extreme volley to everyone who said Trans was folly. It was a temporary stop, to be honest, and thankfully so. I’m sure there was an audience for Everybody’s Rockin’, but it’s not me.
To wit, Landing on Water felt like the best way Young could make good on the promises of Trans. It wasn’t as ambitious as Trans, but it felt like it was the best way he could make use of highline production and computer sounds and synthesizers that sounded authentic to his sound. The biggest knock against it is that it felt like another reaction, a reaction to a reaction. Landing on Water is a far more palatable listen, one I would be more likely to which to return, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s not a better album than Trans. That is the paradox of art. Better pieces aren’t necessarily more accessible ones. There’s something to be said for adventure and ambition, for taking the leap without sense of calibration and making something that maybe you yourself can only understand and appreciate. It’s what separates art from entertainment. It doesn’t mean art is inherently better than entertainment, because nothing that is borne of expression can hierarchically be considered better than anything else based on numbers or scientific criteria alone. However, the boring, safe option made to pay bills rarely reaches the kind of heights that the stab into the unknown based on pure desire to create for yourself and no one else when it hits. When the latter doesn’t hit though, it rarely receives the scorn it gets from an audience that might not understand right away.
Landing on Water was Young’s 15th studio album. By this time, he’d earned the right to rest on his laurels and go back to creating music in the same groove he had when he started. It’s not like he nestled into a well-worn hole like AC/DC though. This Note’s For You lashed out the sellouts. Freedom contained one of his biggest hits in “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Mirror Ball, his collaboration with Pearl Jam that, thanks to record label politics, wasn’t allowed to feature Pearl Jam in the billing, is in the top five albums for both acts. Still, for as rich and relevant as Young’s overall body of work has been in over 50 years of recording and playing, that sweet spot in the ‘80s, the one where he went out of his comfort zone and accidentally predicted a huge chunk of rock music 30 years into the future, should be revisited and respected more. Trans may not be your cup of tea. It’s not exactly mine either. But it’s a work of art, one that deserves its time in the sun.
Although Rolling Stone and Village Voice both reviewed it positively, they allegedly were not in the majority.