Browne Could Use (Neil) Young Voice : While Both Are Heavily Into Message Music, One Does It With Poetry, the Other With a Bludgeon

In a recent review of Jackson Browne’s passionately political new album “World in Motion,” I irritated some of Browne’s passionately loyal fans by complaining that with few exceptions, the whole effort, however well intentioned, unreels like Newsweek-on-tape.

Filled with songs about the plight of the homeless, about political corruption at home and abroad, and about the insensitivity of First-World “haves” toward Third-World “have-notes,” the album forces you to reconsider whether complex international and domestic issues can or even should be reduced to four-minute rock ‘n’ roll songs.

It’s what another writer was getting at in a review of a Moody Blues album several years ago, when he described their songwriting style as the “wrap-up-the-universe-in-three-choruses-and-a-bridge” school.

It’s not that I’ve become less tolerant or more conservative over the years; philosophically, I agree with most of the positions Browne takes in his songs. It’s the way he states them, the way he seems more like a TV news commentator or an ardent preacher than a songwriter. His concert last weekend at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre only reinforced that feeling.

Proving the converse--that pop stars can be equally effective as rockers and as spokesmen and women for social concerns--Neil Young performed at the Pacific Amphitheatre the week before Browne, launching what looks to be one of the most formidable tours of the year.

Browne’s problem is that he can’t translate deeply felt worries into credible lyrics. In “How Long,” for instance, he poses a perfectly legitimate question:

How long can you hear someone

crying

How long can you ear someone

dying

Before you ask yourself why?

Timeless as that query may be, as a song it’s a pallid recycling of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan’s composition turned into a rallying cry for the civil-rights and the anti-war movements of the ‘60s; its rhetorical questions (“How many times must a man look up/Before he sees the sky?/How many ears must one man have/Before he can hear people cry?/How many deaths will it take till he knows/That too many people have died?”) crystallize dilemmas that always have and always will dog humankind.

With Browne, it’s when he rails at his most earnest--and there’s no doubting the sincerity of his convictions--that he falls hardest.

I come here for Dr. King

Who gave the people a precious

thing...

And I come here to praise Mandela

And to send this message to his

jailer...

We come here to sing for freedom

And to send our voices to the ones

who need them .

Freedom for South Africa

And justice for Nelson Mandela.

Nelson Mandela probably welcomes any and every voice that joins the chorus chanting for his release, but rhyming “sing for freedom” with “ones who need them”? Egad. (Not that rhyming “Mandela”” and “jailer” would have won this guy any William Blake awards.) Beyond that, the song, “When the Stone Begins to Turn,” strings together slogans more befitting protesters’ placards. It simply doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t heard (or seen on TV news reports) before.

Where is the perspective, the new light that only an artist can bring to a familiar situation?

On Browne’s album, ironically, it is found in one of the two songs he didn’t write: “My Personal Revenge,” by Tomas Borge and Louis Enrique Mejia Godoy, composers who cry out for gentle victory in the war against oppression:

My personal revenge will be the

right

Of our children in the schools and

in the gardens .

My personal revenge will be to

give you

This song which has flourished

without panic...

My personal revenge will be to tell

you ‘Good morning’

On a street without beggars or

homeless.

That’s a political statement, but it’s also poetry--poetry born of inequality and suffering, a combination that surfaces far too infrequently for the ardent Jackson Browne.

Neil Young, on the other hand, is every bit as angry over social and political injustice in his new album “Freedom.” But compared to Browne and his studied, politically correct editorializing, Young has transformed his wrath into inspired Philippics that consistently jab, sometimes frighteningly so, at the listener, not merely at the evil-doer.

One of the reasons Young’s new material carries such punch is that he hasn’t stuck to easy political stances over the years. Just a few years ago, he was endorsing Ronald Reagan for President--a move that assuredly got his name X’d off the “A” lists for most entertainment-world soirees.

Now he is again examining our dearly held notions of “freedom,” both the up and the downsides that have emerged during this country’s 200-plus years. In “Rockin’ in the Free World,” the cornerstone song of the album, Young paints a bleak picture of life on the streets of urban America with such moral outrage that it’s easy to miss the artistic skill he uses to focus his revulsion:

I see a girl in the night

With a baby in her hand

Under an old street light

Near a garbage can .

Now she puts the kid away

And she’s gone to get a hit .

She hates her life

And what she’s done to it.

That’s a stunning bit of songwriting already, and Young put it across at the Pacific Amphitheatre in an explosive rendition backed by nothing but his own acoustic guitar. And he turns the flame up several more notches in the next verse, as he assesses the result of a life decision made out of desperation:

That’s one more kid

That will never go to school

Never get to fall in love

Never get to be cool .

Keep on rockin’ in the free world .

Putting snide emphasis on the word cool , Young in a single syllable pierced the heart of a culture where being “cool” is often placed above common sense, family commitment or individual integrity.

And that was just for openers.

“Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero Part 1)” nattily rejects easy stereotypes, both left and right: that criminals are either hapless victims of circumstance or the source of all of society’s ills and that the police are either heartless usurpers of power or faultless supermen handcuffed by a criminal-kissing legal system.

‘There’s still crime in the city,’

Said the cop on the beat .

‘I don’t know if I can stop it,

I feel like meat on the street...

That’s why I’m doin’ it my way .

I took the law in my hands .

So here I am in the alleyway ,

A wad of cash in my pants .

I get paid by a 10-year-old ,

He says he looks up to me .

There’s still crime in the city

But it’s good to be free’

Now that’s rage at a world in which it seems that all the old rules, the old tenets about truth, justice and the American way, have fallen by the wayside.

And, equally important, it’s a great song.