Gold9472
07-25-2008, 07:50 AM
CSN&Y protesting war? It’s ‘Deja Vu’
http://news.bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/view/2008_07_25__CSN_Y_protesting_war__It_s_%E2%80%98De ja_Vu_/srvc=home&position=also
By James Verniere
7/25/2008
You’ve heard of the verb “swiftboated.”
Now, get a load of being “Dixie-Chicked.”
Neil Young’s “CSNY Deja Vu” is a road movie about a concert tour by the band known as CSN&Y (average age 62) to its fans. Led by longtime band member and part-time film director/co-writer Young (“Greendale,” “Rust Never Sleeps”), David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills fire up their custom tour buses and hit the road across the USA on their 2006 Freedom of Speech tour just before the midterm elections.
The band members have an agenda: to protest the war in Iraq and musically call for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
Their sets combine such CSN&Y standards as the eponymous “Deja Vu” as well as Young’s sing-along “Let’s Impeach the President.” These guys are not fooling around, and while they are received mostly rapturously in blue states, they’re met with a chorus of boos and upraised middle fingers from about 30 percent of the paying audience in Atlanta.
Whatever happened to protest music in the United States? asks Young, an apparent devotee of filmmaker Michael Moore.
In the 1960s, protest was a catalyst of the youth movement and integral part of the rock scene. Millions sang along to the Doors’ “Unknown Soldier,” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die” and CSN&Y’s own unforgettable, Kent-State-massacre-inspired anthem “Ohio.”
Outside of Green Day and the aforementioned Dixie Chicks, who were pilloried by the press and country-music radio in the aftermath of anti-Bush statements, where do the rockers of today stand on the war? Could their silence be one of the many reasons the music industry has become irrelevant?
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young could have gone on an oldies tour and racked up millions for their retirement coffers. But these aging artists have bravely taken up the gauntlet. While some of the power, if not the musicality, has gone out of their singing and playing, they still have the fire inside.
A compilation of concert and archival footage, interviews with band members, veterans and politicians running for office and video from an appearance by Young on “The Colbert Report,” the film aspires to be the “Fahrenheit 9/11” of concert movies.
It’s not quite that. But CSN&Y fans and young people interested in how a previous generation responded to an unpopular war might want to, if not need to, see this.
http://news.bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/view/2008_07_25__CSN_Y_protesting_war__It_s_%E2%80%98De ja_Vu_/srvc=home&position=also
By James Verniere
7/25/2008
You’ve heard of the verb “swiftboated.”
Now, get a load of being “Dixie-Chicked.”
Neil Young’s “CSNY Deja Vu” is a road movie about a concert tour by the band known as CSN&Y (average age 62) to its fans. Led by longtime band member and part-time film director/co-writer Young (“Greendale,” “Rust Never Sleeps”), David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills fire up their custom tour buses and hit the road across the USA on their 2006 Freedom of Speech tour just before the midterm elections.
The band members have an agenda: to protest the war in Iraq and musically call for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
Their sets combine such CSN&Y standards as the eponymous “Deja Vu” as well as Young’s sing-along “Let’s Impeach the President.” These guys are not fooling around, and while they are received mostly rapturously in blue states, they’re met with a chorus of boos and upraised middle fingers from about 30 percent of the paying audience in Atlanta.
Whatever happened to protest music in the United States? asks Young, an apparent devotee of filmmaker Michael Moore.
In the 1960s, protest was a catalyst of the youth movement and integral part of the rock scene. Millions sang along to the Doors’ “Unknown Soldier,” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die” and CSN&Y’s own unforgettable, Kent-State-massacre-inspired anthem “Ohio.”
Outside of Green Day and the aforementioned Dixie Chicks, who were pilloried by the press and country-music radio in the aftermath of anti-Bush statements, where do the rockers of today stand on the war? Could their silence be one of the many reasons the music industry has become irrelevant?
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young could have gone on an oldies tour and racked up millions for their retirement coffers. But these aging artists have bravely taken up the gauntlet. While some of the power, if not the musicality, has gone out of their singing and playing, they still have the fire inside.
A compilation of concert and archival footage, interviews with band members, veterans and politicians running for office and video from an appearance by Young on “The Colbert Report,” the film aspires to be the “Fahrenheit 9/11” of concert movies.
It’s not quite that. But CSN&Y fans and young people interested in how a previous generation responded to an unpopular war might want to, if not need to, see this.