Let’s Stop Knockin’ the Free World …Forever (Neil) Young!

A REVIEW OF THE NEIL YOUNG FILM PARADOX

Last night – well 3am this morning actually – I was feeling a bit despondent, so I was flicking through YouTube looking for music to lift my mood … I went through the usuals, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and of course His Royal Bobness.

Then I rekindled my relationship with the lumpy bumpy Pork Pie hat-wearing happy hippy baggy jeans-wearing, overweight, scraggy haired Darryl Hannah pulling, goofy looking wild god of rock’n’roll Neil Young. Wow!

In fact we’d just watched Hannah’s strange film Paradox, about Neil and his band, the Outlaws.

Paradox? Rather B*ll*x! A throw-back to 60s and 70s Grateful Dead happenings without any real charm – except for Neil and the Outlaws, particularly the central section when they play an extended version of a song I’d not heard before and have forgotten the title of. Something like Seeds of Life.

Stunning! Incredible! Outrageous! Powerful! Worth watching the whole film for…

Anyway, it got me thinking… what are people doing to our world?

Neil arrives 3 mins 50 secs in … amazing!

All my life, it’s been my job to expose cant and criminality, lies and the lairs of corruption, power and politics, abuse and control.

And today, as I sit locked down in my penthouse prison high above my chosen mountain city of Poprad in Slovakia, I started to think about the European politicians playing with the lives of 746 million people, playing Russian roulette with Covid-19 and the jabs which might save us.

Who do they think they are?

Well, I’ll tell you – they are the very people I’ve spent my life exposing: Self-serving, controlling, lying, cheating, pocket-filling bl**dy clots who don’t give a flying Zeneca f*!k about me and you hiding like clean thieves behind moronic masks!

And then I started to think about all the New Age keyboard warriors who think they are pundits who deny the truth in the Free Press and devour the idiotic agenda-driven lies and dangerousness of social media and Donald Trump without a thought.

Those who had the chance at free speech but thought that just meant you were free to spout obscenities and insults at anybody and anything in a recrafting of languages that are an insult to our writers, historians, publishers and readers. By the inarticulate patwah now used as hieroglyphics they are literally rewriting the very basics of communication. Their very own language.

So, as I surfed through Neil Young vids on Youtube, I suddenly I heard the first notes of Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World … I flicked it full-screen.

It was Eddie Vidor and his band… then 3 minutes 50 secs later (stick with it) Neil Young strode on stage and took over.

He played the life out of a song going back to the Eighties as the Berlin Wall came down. It became an anthem of politics in Europe – an anthem of honesty in power and the struggle for all kinds of freedoms we all deserve.

Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.

Well, let’s us all keep on doing that as the world is reset, as we face dystopia and potential death.

Let’s all get up and rock!

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Categorized as Media

By Leigh Banks

I am a journalist, writer and broadcaster ... lately I've been concentrating on music, I spent many years as a music critic and a travel writer ... I gave up my last editorship a while ago and started concentrating on my blog. I was also asked to join AirTV International as a co host of a new show called Postcard ...

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