apples and oranges gone too far...?: Neil Young vs. Fela Kuti

(*sorry, no Bowie option)

Neil. Sorry Fela.

Just the 70s? Fela.

Absolutely Fela. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is from '69, and Neil doesn't have another good album until Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, and frankly I could take the latter and leave the former. I saw him live in '91 and he was awesome, but the dude is massively overrated on disc.

neil young is this summer's steely dan btw.

Absolutely Fela. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is from '69, and Neil doesn't have another good album until Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust

uh

neil young is every season's neil young!

also i love the expensive shit outta fela but neil easy

"Neil doesn't have another good album until Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust"

This is just wrong.

Fela

btw don't let the semantics of the phrase 'put out' throw anybody off...from what I understand two or three of NY's best albums never even got released...

There are good songs on many Neil Young albums between 1969 and 1979, but not one album I would listen to all the way through.

(listening to Zombie right now; can't imagine anyone finding this poll easy...)

it's really difficult to grasp what exactly you enjoy about neil young if you don't enjoy his 70s albums

this was an easy vote for me cuz Fela basically does one thing (albeit totally amazingly) while Neil does like 3 or 4 things really well. I appreciate variety.

"There are good songs on many Neil Young albums between 1969 and 1979, but not one album I would listen to all the way through."

This still seems wrong although I will acknowledge that most of those records are not perfect.

What are the other 1 or 2 things that Neil does really well? Cuz I can only think of two (and one of those I don't like that much).

eh I hadn't registered that this is 70s only, in which case I woulda included "weirdo concept records" in his repertoire - but c'mon we all know what Neil is best at: rough n ragged garage rock jams and sensitive folkie balladeering. I think he also does country rock really well but that's kinda a combo of the other two. I dunno, for me Neil just evokes a wider range of emotions than Fela does, he covers more ground.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is from '69, and Neil doesn't have another good album until Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, and frankly I could take the latter and leave the former. I saw him live in '91 and he was awesome, but the dude is massively overrated on disc.

― unperson

you are high on the fine (curvy) colombian if you think this is true

Whatever it is you're smoking, I don't want any

"rough n ragged garage rock jams and sensitive folkie balladeering"

That's only two though!

well country rock would be three (cuz Needle and the Damage Done and Comes a Time sound pretty different, at least to me), and four would be stuff like Human Highway, Trans, Everybody's Rockin', etc.

you know, I'm kind of shocked that Neil has taken the early lead here...I know he's been hot around ILM lately, but I really figured that consensus would be that Fela made Neil look like some goony cracker--I mean Fela's music is so much more sophisticated, their lyrical concerns so much weightier (even though you usually have to wait 8 minutes to hear them, not unheard of in Neil-land either), his figure so much more larger-than-life...contra Shakey, even from the limited exposure I've had to Fela, I can tell his range is fucking wide, from the hypnotic jazz of 'Dog Eat Dog' to the scrabble funk of 'Zombie' which is like a Slits song stretched out to ten minutes...Shakey forgets that Fela does three or four things amazingly well within one song...

Still it's difficult to deny Neil...not just because the extraordinaryamount of spellbinding songs he was writing back then, but also because he really was a master of the albums format, perhaps THE Master...Gold Rush, On the Beach, Rust Never Sleeps really are perfect albums; Everybody Knows, Time Fades Away, Zuma are almost as good...the precison with which the mood and pacing is controlled, the way the already kaleidoscopic lyrical view of the individual songs tends to mesh together into a greater whole, makes each album seem like both a grand artistic statement and a postcard from an old friend...you wouldn't think that the work of someone in the singer-songwriter tradition, as tired as it seems, would yield such astonishing richness...

i'm not really qualified to vote as i have around 15 fela albums and only 3 by neil young, but fela's going to get my vote.

i have about 5 of each...:(

on the beach title track always sounds like it is being used evocatively in a movie to me

Fela no hesitation for me and I love Neil Young, too, but..."Coffin for Head of State" edges "Tonight's the Night" by a hair

I mean Fela's music is so much more sophisticated, their lyrical concerns so much weightier (even though you usually have to wait 8 minutes to hear them, not unheard of in Neil-land either), his figure so much more larger-than-life

this is all veryyy debatable. well...maybe not the last thing.

Yeah that last thing is pretty much indisputable.

but I mean 'ohio'? 'southern man'? the 'hey another friend just died of drug-use' songs? the trans songs that he wrote to his son w/ cerebral palsy?

Fela's music is so much more sophisticated = this is lower-levels codespeak for 'polyrhythms'...sorry...

lyrical concerns so much weightier = J0hn has the right idea here...

ts: having the best musician in yr band get so fucked up on horse that he can't play, having to fire him off yr tour, thereby hastening his inevitable overdose -vs.- having the government raid yr home, throw yr mother out of a window, causing her fatal injuries, and then sending her coffin to a military barracks...

neil is a goony cracker but he's my goony cracker.

well then I guess the best song ever was probably written by some guy during the holocaust.

neil young was born a white dude. in canada. his life was pretty fucking weighty for a canadian white dude.

totally missing my point

first off, I did not call NY a goony cracker, that was just how I thought you guys might feel about me putting the two side by side...minor misgivings, that's all

second, Fela was commenting on social injustice in a country where freedom of speech wasn't an inalienable right...Fela criticizing the government was not just some tired countercultural gesture as it is nowadays, but a declaration of war with real brutal consequences...

so yeah Zombie might be a little weightier lyrically than Needle and the Damage Done, Ok?

fwiw I haven't even voted yet and probably like both about equally, but I listen to neil young more.

I just don't think the weightiness of their songs is:
a. very different (they're both v. v. political songwriters, just happen to have lived on different continents)
and
b. a good factor for comparison

"goony cracker" is still a dumb thing to say imo

i take it back

Yeah you should have stuck with goony.

i mean for me what it comes down to is that although both are a+ i just listen to neil way more

fela all the way. i'm relatively new to his music, but its impact on me can't really be understated. that and neil and i can't seem to click, no matter what records of his i listen to.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

hahaha awesome

so yeah Zombie might be a little weightier lyrically than Needle and the Damage Done, Ok?

"Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."
-Neil Young, "On the Beach"