Here’s the chorus:
I loved life as we knew it/I still can’t believe we threw it away
Goodbye, that’s all there is to it/Life as we knew it ended today.
Sound like just another musical reference to a romantic relationship?
Or a lament of the moral, legal, judicial and physical destruction of American life triggered by the results of the 2024 presidential election? Perhaps a regret, put to music, for having installed in the Oval Office an authoritarian bent on cruel treatment of the disadvantaged, on stifling dissent and speech, targeting political opponents, pardoning criminally inclined allies, bypassing the legislature, using the military for domestic control, defying the courts, controlling the news media, intimidating universities, using his power for personal profit?
I loved life as we knew it/I still can’t believe we threw it away
Goodbye, that’s all there is to it/Life as we knew it ended today.
Here’s another ditty that seems to apply to the present:
Yeah, let’s impeach the president for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into color
And still leaving Black people neglected.
Fact check: The first tune indeed is about a love match gone sideways, written by Walter Carter and Fred Koller and recorded by Kathy Mattea in 1988. But the echo in there, loud and clear now?….Life as we knew it thrown away?
The other example, authored by Neil Young—Canadian-born naturalized Yank—is from 1973, the year that a blowhard real estate tycoon named Donald Trump, working for his father’s New York operation, counter-sued the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to more than $700 million now) over charges that Trump’s properties had discriminated against Black applicants and tenants.
If this should arise on a test, the answer is pretty clear that Young was protesting Tricky Dick Nixon’s misdeeds in the White House rather than demonstrating some sort of clairvoyance 50 years into the future. But the current, overwhelming march away from life as we knew it manifests itself as what some medical experts describe as an earworm, the inability to dislodge a song and prevent it from repeating itself in our heads.
I loved life as we knew it….
A John Prine lyric from a few years ago could also fit about now:
Some humans ain’t human
Some people ain’t kind
They lie through their teeth
With their head up their behind
And I’m also hearing in my head a catchy number recorded by Willie Nelson (and his friend Merle Haggard):
Now it’s all going to pot
Whether we like it or not
The best I can tell
The world’s gone to hell
And we’re sure gonna miss it a lot
Given Willie’s personal reputation for long endorsing the use of weed, there certainly is a whiff of marijuana there. But think bigger picture. The world’s gone to hell….
Music is a great thing, a soundtrack of our lives, our emotions and experiences. And not always uplifting. It can make you think.
Okay. Bottom line: I can’t sing. I pretended to play the guitar years ago; got a Beatles songbook with all the chords and so on. Like so many Boomers, I witnessed some terrific concerts, mostly enjoying the gigs by the likes of Pete Seeger and the sly Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez. Dylan. Protest anthems. There were lots of anti-war songs around my college days, Kris Kritofferson’s “Good Christian Soldier” among the best.
‘Cause it’s hard to be a Christian soldier, when you tote a gun
And it hurts to have to watch a grown man cry
But we’re playin’ cards, writin’ home, an’ ain’t we havin’ fun
Turnin’ on and learnin’ how to die
I just read the obituary about a man named John Cleary, who had survived being shot in the chest by Ohio National Guard troops during an antiwar protest at Kent State University in 1970, a chilling moment in American history that suddenly doesn’t seem so abnormal, with ICE agents and the National Guard terrorizing citizens in Chicago and elsewhere. Back then, Neil Young weighed in…
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio.
It turns out that Neil Young is still holding powerful people’s feet to the fire, musically, with his rocking “Big Crime:”
Don’t need no fascist rules, don’t want no fascist schools
Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets
Got big crime in DC at the White House
There’s big crime in DC at the White House
Chorus:
No more great again, no more great again/Got big crime in DC at the White House.
Not life as we knew it.