Most artists need to understand that not everyone is going to like every song they put out. It’s one thing to have a core audience that sticks with you through thick and thin and worships every track you play, but there are just as many that would rather stick a coathanger through their ear than have to listen to what you have to say. No one can possibly please everyone, but Neil Young admitted that he was intentionally trying to upset people when he wrote ‘Let’s Impeach The President’.
Then again, Young was the last person who could be relied on to play it safe. He worked for no one else but the muse in his head, and if someone else told him to change his style or try his hand at writing something more pop-flavoured, chances are he would have walked right over them or intentionally gone in the opposite direction.
By the early 2000s, though, Young did at least settle into a certain style of Americana music. Ever since his time with Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball, he had been slowly taking things down a notch. While records like Prairie Wind weren’t cut out to be major hits, they suited his rough vocals perfectly.
That didn’t mean that he couldn’t speak his mind, and as soon as the Iraq War got underway, Young had the kind of scathing indictment that could put Green Day and The Chicks to shame. On ‘Let’s Impeach The President’, Young is at his most vicious lyric-wise, almost as if he was writing it as a letter to the American people to explain how and why Bush was driving the country into the ground.
That said, it’s not exactly the catchiest melody he had ever conceived. Even by the curve that most people grade Young’s vocal performances on, this feels less like the nasally earnestness that he’s known for and ends up closer to a school bully who somehow never grew up past high school.
It was never intended to sound too flashy, but that was the point, with Young later recalling, “When I wrote ‘Let’s Impeach the President,’ a lot of people criticized it as a crappy song, that it was such a terrible melody. What am I going to do, write a song like that and use a good melody? That doesn’t make sense. You want a melody that pisses people off, that’s so stupid and repetitive that it aggravates people.”
There was probably no other way to deliver this song in that respect. Young was breaking down in front of the American people on this tune, and if he wanted to get people rallied behind his cause, he needed a melody that was going to hit someone like a smack in the face instead of the laid-back demeanour of his last few records.
Although Young didn’t manage to help the cause during Bush’s presidency, ‘Let’s Impeach the President’ is the best case of an old rocker still showing that he had the chops to talk about pressing issues. Some of his fans may have given him nasty looks, but it’s always better to speak your mind than cower to what you think your fans want from you.