Yesterday I watched a bit of a documentary called 1971: the Year That Music Changed Everything. And there’s a bit of Boomer pretentiousness, right? Changed everything! For crying out loud, Won’t Get Fooled Again, What’s Going On? and Ohio were pretty good tunes but they changed precisely nothing. And, anyways, if you want a song with refrain of “what’s going on?” the 1993 song What’s Up? is actually superior (though I may be biased as the songwriter/singer is a contemporary and so the song speaks more to me than Boomer political slop even though it is more overtly Left in tone than Marvin Gaye’s song).

But what caught my eye is that it opens with Chrissie Hynde talking and until I watched I didn’t know she had been present at Kent State during the riots there (her work with the band The Pretenders not starting until 1978). Hynde is, of course, a life-long far Left person – but she’s also one of the few intelligent people on the Left and so when cancel culture got started she condemned that because how can you arrive at truth if people aren’t allowed to be offended? Anyways, she’s talking about Kent State very matter of factly – no high emotion just saying they had burned down the ROTC building because they felt that the Army shouldn’t be on “their” campus…and you could tell in the talking that she was looking back on it all and wondering just how they came to believe the Army was the problem and that the campus on a taxpayer-funded college belongs to the kids? And then as she finishes talking the video cuts to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing their very famous song about it, Ohio. You know it:

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in Ohio

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Apparently, Young wrote this in a flash of anger after hearing the news of Kent State. It was released in 1971 (so, of course, included in a documentary about 1971) even though the events happened the year before and…it did just ok. Peaking at number 14 on the charts…which makes you wonder just how much of everything the song could have changed?

I don’t know if the documentary producers meant it, but the juxtaposition of Hynde’s reasonable reminisces and Young’s shouting contemporary screed is very interesting. She was there. She knew what happened and what they had been up to. Young wasn’t. He saw the TV news reports about it. The song wasn’t about the events at Kent State but about how Cronkite and other news-actors presented it to Young. One recalls another Young song called Southern Man which made out that white Southerners were just racists who didn’t want white women having sex with black guys…and this was ripped to shreds by Ronnie Van Zant in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Sweet Home Alabama which has the line:

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow

To Young’s credit he did later admit that he richly earned that slam and it is one of the best lines ever written in a pop song (the best line in a pop song is “Many dreams come true And some have silver linings” in the Led Zepplin song Over the Hills and Far Away – I will not be taking questions about this assertion). And perhaps if Young had actually found out a bit about Kent State – or even just thought about it a bit, the song Ohio would have been different? Probably. But that is kinda the problem, isn’t it? People just reacting – especially reacting to dramatic video presented in a way designed to elicit a conditioned response. After all, Hynde one day decided to write a song about Ohio and called it My City Was Gone (you remember it as the opening music for Rush Limbaugh’s show).

I went back to Ohio
But my city was gone
There was no train station
There was no down-town

South Howard had disappeared
All my favorite places
My city had been pulled down
Reduced to parking spaces

Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio

No mention of Kent State which must have been a formative and very shocking event in her life…because, of course, it was in the end, nothing. A tragedy in four deaths but a farce about why they happened. For heaven’s sake, the Army wasn’t the problem. No matter how much you hated the war in Vietnam, hated Nixon, even hated America…the Army is not in charge of deciding things. And the kids burning down the ROTC building were exact contemporaries of the kids in the Army at the time. Were they evil? The Left would have people believe so…and worked up events to convince people it was, but it was all stupid and any really thinking person looking back on it would be appalled by their participation in a stupid riot that ended up getting four people killed. And so the thinking person’s song is about urban sprawl.

On and on it has gone over the decades…provoked action, manipulated media reporting, emotional reaction. And it goes into the Book of Liberal Lore as canon…never a modification or a bit of reflection…it was Nixon who killed those kids at Kent State just like Brown had his hands up and was saying don’t shoot. When its all a very long time past, someone will make a documentary about it and will just rehash it all…just wait: in 2034 there will be “20 years after” documentaries about the Ferguson riots…and the 2045 documentaries about the anti-ICE riots will be a thing to behold! If, that is, the Left is still around to spin the Narrative. I’m starting to think they won’t be.

I think it is rather played out now – and with the money being cut off, the sinews of propaganda will weaken. And I think we’re all rather tired of it…this pretend world where those who set fires are heroes and the firefighters are the bad guys. Just perhaps by 2045 we’ll have a new version of Hynde singing an interesting song…rather than regurgitated slop about Fighting the Man? Hope so. It’ll be like being liberated.