O, Song! Daily Links

sallyo:

o-song:

Except that Dawes – however respectfully, considering the pastiche – disagree with Neil Young’s old ode to chauvinism. Depending on your point of view, Neil Young’s song will either evoke thoughts about a) how abjectly hopeless men are, how we need women to ensure we don’t fall apart or b) how a woman’s place is in the home, looking after these abjectly hopeless men. As a sometimes abjectly hopeless specimen, I can see the appeal of a) but can also see just how horrifying b) is.

I’ve never understood the line of thought that “A Man Needs a Maid” is sexist! (Well, maybe if you look at the title out of context.) Neil’s using “a man” not in the universal sense, but in the particular – this man needs a maid. Or rather, he needs something/someone stable to cling to, but his wounds are still raw from last time around (“My life is changing in so many ways/ I don’t know who to trust anymore”). He both needs love and fears it, knowing that an emotional connection will wreck the stability he’s so desperate for (“To live a love, you got to be part of”). The idea of hiring a maid (who’ll live nearby but not with him, and will “go away” only at the mutually agreed-upon time) is an attempt to align his needs for companionship and emotional distance. But no matter how often he repeats the phrase “a man needs a maid,” even backing his assertion with great symphonic strings and bells, he knows it’s an unsatisfactory compromise – he always comes back to wondering “When will I see you again?” The song’s not about women, but about trying to reconcile conflicting emotions despite knowing deep down that’s impossible. Men aren’t the only ones who can relate.

(PS: Congratulations on your new position! Here’s hoping you’ll have time to keep turning out more fine pieces.)

Thanks! 

And I agree with this - I was too glib in that piece about ‘A Man Needs A Maid’. But I do think the song having such a big string arrangement does signify some sort of intended universality, whether that was the intention or not. And most people only remember choruses anyway. So, without thinking very hard about the song, it could very easily come across badly. It seems to me that there’s a tension between music that intends to be an authentic representation of a singer-songwriter’s individual feelings and that music being big and popular, and my mixed feelings about ‘A Man Needs A Maid’ come from this. If Neil played the song live, and there were thousands of men singing along to just the chorus, it’d make me feel pretty weird, for example!

But I once played keyboards at a tribute night that did the entirety of Neil Young’s Decade over a couple of nights, and it fell to me, a violinist, and the lead singer from the band Peabody to do ‘A Man Needs A Maid’. I remember him being wary of singing the song, initially thinking it was straightforwardly sexist, and trying to figure out how he’d sing it so as to align with his personal beliefs. In the end, his take on the song was like yours - he sung it as being about loneliness.

At the same time, the line about the actress is literally true - he literally did see a movie and fall in love with the actress, Carrie Snodgress, who he tracked down and married, and who left acting when they married. But he ended up being disillusioned with her, if I remember Shakey correctly, because the fantasy of who she was based on the movie didn’t match up with real life. In real life, she wanted to be surrounded by people all the time, and ultimately wasn’t the person she was in the movie. This meant that Young felt like he couldn’t get any space/peace & quiet when he was home. And so you could also take ‘A Man Needs A Maid’ as Young having little empathy/understanding for a wife who’d just given up a career for him, and who was probably struggling to adjust to living with a musician who would have been on tour most of the time.