Rockin in the free world meaning
Friday Song: “Rockin’ in the Free World”
We’re in the midst of stressful times, as powers of various kinds — authoritarian, economic, reactionary, and religious — aim to constrain humanity in cages of various designs.
In previous times, protest music was an important element shaping the responses to insults, corruption, and inequities.
These days, lounge music and vocal/producer collaborations dominate popular song, with little room for demonstration songs of the caliber of Neil Young’s 1989 classic, “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Written in response to the first Bush Administration, the lyrics mock trite political slogans of that era, with “thousand points of light” and “kinder, gentler” woven in.
Young wrote the song in response to the problems in the world, with the title inspired after a Russian promoter absconded with money intended to promote a cultural exchange concert between the US and Russia. Dealing with the news of the theft that would hinder Young and his band from traveling to Russia, one member said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep rockin’ in the free world.”
Released a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the song became an anthem as freed
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she's done to it
There's one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to
Neil Young (as a homeless person)
(frame from "Rockin' In The Free World" music video)
Neil Young's song “Rockin’ In the Free World” is so iconic that even U.S. presidential candidates use it to launch their campaigns. Imagine that?
And while we have spent a great deal of time here on this blog analyzing the song “Rockin’ In the Free World” over the last few decades, we do sometime wonder just what it is about this song exactly that makes it work on so many levels?
To answer this question in terms of melody, lyrics, and chord progressions here is a detailed analysis from Neil Young, “Rockin’ In the Free World”: Why It Works | The Essential Secrets of Songwriting by Gary Ewer:
Melody
If you listen to a lot of Neil Young songs, you start to see that even though a song may be in a simple major or minor key (this one is in E minor, with an A chord thrown in, borrowed from the dorian mode), he tends to favour pentatonic melody shapes.
An E minor pentatonic scale uses the notes E, G, A, B and D, and you’ll notice that a lot of the verse melody dwells on these notes, particularly D, E and G:
Those melodic ideas, playing in and around those three
“Rockin’ in the Free World” is one of Neil Young’s most popular songs. It’s number 216 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Every time I ever do a “Why It Works” analysis of a song on this blog, you’ll see me mentioning some aspect of the simplicity of design as a positive feature, and this tune is no different. The melody is fairly restricted in range, it’s built over a couple of very related, simple progressions, and it uses a basic verse-chorus format with a guitar solo in the middle and one at the end.
If you like starting songs by working with a chord progression, you need to read “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression.” It will give you the pros and cons of this songwriting method, and help you create songs that really work!
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Let’s take a look at each element and see how they connect to each other, and how those connections make this song really work.
Melody
If you listen to a lot of Neil Young songs, you start to see that even though a song may be in a simple major or minor key (this one is in E minor, with
35 Years Ago: Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ Comeback
With "Rockin' in the Free World," Neil Young fashioned a signature song that was at once timeless and very much of its era. But it couldn't have been created in a more offhanded manner.
Young was on the road in February 1989 when he found out that a cultural exchange tour of Russia wasn't going to work out. "They were getting us in exchange for the Russian Ballet – and it just fell through," longtime guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro later told Rolling Stone. "Neil was like, 'Damn, I really wanted to go.' I said, 'Me too. I guess we'll have to keep on rockin' in the free world.'"
Young loved the quip, and the more Sampedro thought about it, the more certain he became that it would provide fertile subject matter during a transitional period in history.
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"He was like, 'Wow, that's a cool line,'" Sampedro told Yahoo! in 2013. "Then I said it again later and he said, 'That's a really go