Neil Young
Well, OK, I don’t know about you or your mom. But Neil Young once would have, and did. On May 4, 1970, students at Kent State University in Ohio mounted a protest against the Vietnam war. The national guard was called in, and in a chaotic standoff 13 unarmed young people were cut down by the guardsmen at close range in what was later legally designated self-defense. Four died. On hearing the news, Young walked off into the woods and emerged with the brilliant, disturbing hit “Ohio,” an act of mourning that doubled as a national challenge. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded it within the month, and Atlantic Records rushed it to DJs in a plain white sleeve.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Anybody who’s heard “Ohio” has at some point probably thought that nobody could write a song like it today. People complain about corporate control and the timidity of radio stations–the invisible limits imposed by our growing technology, economy, and power. But that’s not specific enough: those things set limits, but they don’t control our minds. The problem isn’t just that another “Ohio” wouldn’t get played–the reality that made that song work no longer exists, and neither does the audience for it.
Yet even as “Ohio” climbed into the top 20, the protest movement stopped working. Attendance at rallies fell off after Kent State, and the counterculture started to disintegrate. The problem was that “Ohio,” not to mention Nixon’s soldiers, offered listeners a tough choice: resist for real or give up. Along with the stick of bloodshed, the administration offered the carrot of de-escalation in Vietnam. So the students’ shed blood soaked into the ground, the boomers enjoyed a decade of ambivalent complicity, and Neil Young wrote songs about other things.
Our national sense of self was torn apart and rendered vulnerable for a few weeks in mid- to late September. During that period, things seemed open, in an unpleasant and scary but potentially interesting way, and everybody, spontaneously or not, elected to pull for sobriety, piety, and solidarity. Practically the only critical responses on a national scale came from the Onion. Thanks to all those held tongues, that gap between then and now narrowed and later became, in retrospect, a kind of initiation into a newly hardened and immutable national self.
