Neil Young News

Saturday, March 24, 2018

INTERVIEW: Neil Young Talks Art, Algorithms, and Music Saving The World | Noisey

Here's an interview with Neil Young discussing art, algorithms, and the likelihood of music saving the world from "Smoke Some Weed, Take a Walk, and Read This Interview With Neil Young | Noisey by Andrea Domanick.

Noisey: You've recently gone back through your entire back catalog to create the Neil Young Archives. I wonder what it was like to return to all that and think of yourself as a younger man playing music, responding to a changing world.

Neil Young: You know, I don't think about it much. You'd think I'd think about it all the time by looking at the Archives, but really the Archives is just a chronicle, a platform to organize things that have already happened. All I'm really doing is now dealing with shit that I have, and putting it in place. Occasionally, I'll go round and get immersed in things that I've done and just... it's cool to be able to visit them. And it's really cool to be able to hear them, because I don't like to listen now because it sounds so bad. Music has suffered so much at the hands of big tech. Most of the listeners today don't even realize how deprived they are. They are getting music and they love music—that's good. But they're only getting five percent of the sound of the music—especially when you relate it to the classics from the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s. These new mp3 copies, whatever the Hell they are, I know they're five percent or less. If I was a painter and now we're looking at a bad sepia tone of the full color picture—that's disturbing. That's my fuel. That's why I drive forward with the audio technology.

I'm coming from the past, and I'm saying there's a door that could open or a window that could open. And you guys all who love music and love the whole scene and love everything about it might hear something and feel something that you've never had a chance to. That's my approach now. I go to the record companies and I say: "Why should you restrict access to the golden gates of music—to the crown jewels, these recordings, these ancient fucking recordings of great stuff by Frank Sinatra, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Glenn Miller, anything. Why should you restrict all of the quality of that to five percent of what it was when it was made? What's the advantage?"

Noisey: How difficult is it for you, then, to feel optimism in your music and in your life when you have such a history of fighting against things like this?

Neil Young: Well, I'm very optimistic that the human spirit can overcome lots of things. I don't think that where we are now is a sign of where we're going. I think this is a low-point—the far end of the pendulum swing. It's not a good thing right now. But my biggest concern right now is not that the guy in charge has no balls and doesn't know how to say goodbye to people and he's a very poor model for our children. That really means a lot to me, but it doesn't mean anything to me compared to the damage he's doing to the environment. That is reckless. That bothers me.

This is all a very, very dark thing that's happening. And people are starting to feel it. I don't like people logging into me [the Archives] from Facebook. If they're going to log in from Facebook, I want to give them the option of reading something about Facebook when they arrive, so they know where they came from. And I still use Facebook because my users, my fans, people who want to know what we're doing, we tell them what we're doing. But you have to go to our place, and you don't have any of the rules, and we're not going to track you and use you. Once you leave that area, you're in a safe area, which is our place. So, we want people to know that we care about that. I mean, when you have algorithms that encourage children under 10 to be into porn...

Noisey: It's so terrifying and dystopian.

Neil Young: It's insane that that exists.It's a misuse of the technology. Technology's meant to make life better. The bad guys now can use the tools the good guy uses, that were made for the good guy. But the bad guy's got them, and the people who make them are very, very, very wrong in saying it's not their responsibility. It is their responsibility, but they don't want to police. They don't want to be that which they put down. But you have to realize there's a responsibility with having power. So you have to be able to let people know what's going on. Let them know.