http://www.newstatesman.com/200709270029
Lost in a century
Alice O'Keeffe
Published 27 September 2007

In contrast, La Radiolina sounds urgent and hectoring, laden with rock guitars, wailing sirens and lyrics that border dangerously on the facile: "In Baghdad/it's no democracy/just because it's a US country/In Fallujah too much calamity/This world go crazy, it's a fatality." In its lighter moments ("Me Llaman Calle" and "Otro Mundo"), La Radiolina recalls the best of Manu Chao, but too often it feels like being trapped next to a member of the Socialist Workers Party at closing time in the student bar.The feeling is not entirely dispelled by an hour in conversation with Chao; he has a tendency to make apocalyptic pronouncements, such as: "If we stay like this: chaos. End of civilisation. I mean what I'm saying. It's a matter of time" and "Capitalism is barbarity, it's the law of the jungle in money". Maybe so, but I find myself wondering what happened to the sensitive, poetic person I heard on his early albums.

Why couldn't they have got someone to interview him who was actually sympathetic to his ideas? I can't understand why the writer feels we would particularly care to have her status quo viewpoint inserted here. Would she find it so very implausible to think that it might be his political 'sensitivity' that makes his records so popular in the first place? Evidently so. Well, hopefully Mr Chao won't be too concerned about her strictures on how to be the nice, well-behaved sort of rock star that she would prefer to listen to. What piffle.

Tags: Manu Chao, Globalization

I can't get it out of my head. Amy Winehouse and her cover of the Toots and the Maytals 'Monkey Man' (with the arrangement borrowed from The Specials' version) on the Jools Holland Hootenanny show, over New Year... The legs, the dress almost falling off, the totally skank rhythm... thank you God!

Neil Young's new album will appeal to his fans but also to political activists of a more populist persuasion. Eschewing the intellectual flair of more contemporary critics, who tend in one way or another to interrogate the major political issues of our time through the lens of 'spectacular' media-driven capitalism, Young resorts to the themes of social activists who railed against the elite monopolies on social power during America's 'Gilded Age'.
Songs here echo the political sentiments he has already expressed in such albums as Ragged Glory. Where such earlier work used populist tactics to address environmental degredation, here the primary topic is the 'Madison Avenue war' being waged by the pernicious Bush Administration in Afghanistan and Iraq. In voicing these concerns, Young is hardly the first major artist to come out solidly against 'war'. Steve Earl's recent anti-war album makes an equal if not more energized 'rock versus war' statement. However, where Earl's clout as an artist was insufficient to get 'on the radar' in the mainstream media, Young will undoubtedly have greater luck.
Here Young combines sometimes plaintive pleas for justice with caustic remarks on Bush's policy priorities (one highlight is Young's throwaway riff on the irony of Bush's support for controls on athletes' use of steroids only *after* he'd gotten out of the baseball business). Like Earl, he doesn't let the lyrics hold him back from delivering a very hard, gritty sound. Moreover, like Earl again, he is not afraid to give 'voice' to the experience of soldiers, missing their homes and the values it is ideally supposed to serve, or their families. Musically, the album has a gritty 'session'-like feel. Supported by a 100-strong choir, all of the songs evoke the theme of the multitude's struggle for justice. 'Let's impeach the President' really delivers in this sense. This album is medicine for the political activist, leaving one with a sense of hope that though populism we can still effect political change. 

Review by Nicholas Kiersey
Neil Young, 'Living With War'
Reprise / WEA
2006