Neil Young Forgot

My wife wanted me to blog on Neil Young's new "Impeach the President" song. Yawn. What a rebel. I have no idea what the music sounds like, but he could have assembled the lyrics by copying and pasting randomly from any one of a million angry-lefty blogs. Poetic and subtle they aren't. Well, put him ahead of that ex-ER actor for next year's Heroic Hollywood Dissident Award anyway.

UPDATE: Ok, on second thought I do have a few more things to say about this. Politically strident art is an incredible waste of time. Art delivers moral messages effectively through subtle emotional engagement. The entertainment industry has failed miserably at that over the past few years, especially when it tries to directly confront conservatism (or what it perceives as conservatism). Having lost control of American government over the past decade (Congress, the Presidency, state governorships, state legislatures, etc.), leftist artists seem to think elevated intensity will make their messages more convincing. They may feel better after producing songs and movies that are political primal screams, and their efforts may be appreciated by other leftists, but they aren't very effective or entertaining.

Each year I rank the top-100 highest user-rated movies in the Internet Movie Database and add any good ones I've missed to my DVD rental list. I've done year-by-year searches all the way back to 1970 or so, and in the past few years I've noticed a definite increase in the number of highly-rated, yet mediocre and politically tendentious films. These films have C-shaped rating graphs--meaning everyone who agreed with the film's "message" rated it a ten and everyone who disagreed rated it a one. I find that highly annoying.

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Related Washington Post stories: Young's Protest Album Heads to Internet; Young's Anti-War Album