Suppose you were a popular hero of the 1970s, lionised for political protest. But the 1980s were less kind, and since then you had found it hard to make the same impact, even if you remained inspirational to younger generations of musicians. Suppose that once again the current government of your country had begun to appal you, even though you had initially supported it. What would you do?
Both Neil Young and Thomas Mapfumo have reached the same answer: knock out a set of ambitious, scathing songs and release it for download as an instant iProtest album. Mapfumo’s Rise Up, an exhortation to his fellow Zimbabweans to oppose the government of Robert Mugabe, made it to the internet last year and now has a belated physical release on RealWorld; Young’s Living with War raised eyebrows as a collection of MP3s a few months ago and now comes in a staggeringly unattract-ive package from Reprise.
Thomas Mapfumo is a hugely important figure in Zimbabwean music. His chimurenga (Shona for “rebellion”) songs were a rallying cry for the insurgency against the white Rhodesian regime that raged throughout the 1970s . They set traditional melodies for the mbira, an instrument made up of resonant metal strips played with the thumbs, to electric guitars. Zimbabwean music as a rule has a fatal weakness for the saccharine, but this was different. It was a thrilling sound even for those who did not understand the “deep proverbs” buried in the lyrics; for those who did, it was incendiary.
Mapfumo’s relationship with Zanu-PF was always uneasy: he soon lambasted the new government for its corruption. Now living in America, he has become a stern critic of Robert Mugabe. Rise Up laments the state of Zimbabwe: migrant workers who have to travel abroad, widespread sickness and disease, a nation, as “Kuvarira Mukati” has it, suffering in silence.
These are melancholy songs: the lion howls rather than roars. The album’s centrepiece, “Marudzi Nemar-udzi”, a plea for universal solidarity, starts with a proud but achingly sad melody, then abruptly shifts into a thundering, assertive clatter, as if to model the uprising Mapfumo longs for.
Unlike Mapfumo, Neil Young performs more in anger than in sorrow. The Canadian has been all over the map. One of his finest hours was the single “Ohio”, a response to the killing of four demonstrators by the National Guard at Kent State in 1970: passionate, memorable and, uncharacteristically for Young, short and to the point. But having savaged Nixon he later supported Reagan, then ambivalently celebrated the end of communism with “Rocking in the Free World”. He toured during the first Gulf war with a industrial feedback attack that matched the ferocity of the fighting. (One disc, Arc, collected all the squalls and shrieks with the songs removed, a clever piece of conceptual art, but not often listened to these days.) Only a few years ago he celebrated the passengers of Flight 93 with “Let’s Roll”. Now his message is “Let’s Impeach the President”. He is, you might say, tough on terror, tough on the war on terror.
Young has been roundly mocked for his political wanderings, although in fact he displays a consistent anti-authoritarian streak: he sees no contradiction in opposing both fundamentalist terrorism and a power grab by the state. Politics aside, Living with War is a solidly listen-able Neil Young album, chock full of riffs. He borrows from Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” for “Flags Of Freedom” and from his own “My My (Hey Hey)” for “Let’s Impeach the President”. Extra colouration comes from an overused 100-strong choir and a mock- military trumpet.
Living with War closes with a straight choral performance of “America the Beautiful”, the US’s understudy national anthem: a simultaneous nod to and rejection of Hendrix’s shredding of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Young is not angry with America but with what has been done to it. It took this to nudge him out of bathetic acoustic strumming and back into his own brand of shock and awe.
