Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young - Deja vu

Speaking of Neil Young, here he is with Crosby, Stills, Nash, Taylor, Reeves, Sebastian, Garcia (yes, the one they call Jerry), and Mitchell (even if she isn't credited as backup vocals, she's in there and so is "Woodstock"). I mentioned Wu Tang Clan last night, but the comparison works equally well for this group of omnipresent California hippies. They all played with each other in 12 or 20 different bands, and i think they just drew names out of a hat for instrumentation and songwriter credits. If you played in California in 1968-1971 one or more of them showed up to the gig and played whether you asked them to or not. Like in the pre-gig walk around they'd show you where the bathrooms and green room were, and point out where David Crosby had been camping that week so you could arrange your gear around him accordingly.

From an "album" standpoint it's actually kind of weird. Exactly like i described above, every track is from a recording session by the credited songwriter, and one or more of the group might not have been in the studio that day. It's more like a studio compilation than an actual album by a band. Even more bizarre, it's the best selling album in every individual musician's discography. That's a little bit like saying "you know what would make this Buffalo Springfield album great? If we replaced Graham Nash and Neil Young with Bob Weir and Carlos Santana and had them play Joan Baez songs."

That sounds like i'm being negative. I'm not. One of the things that makes this album work so well is the intentional openness to interpretation that they created. Deja Vu could refer to the similar situations all of these people keep finding themselves in, or the general notion of little people accomplishing big things, or even the actual fact that they all end up on each others records anyway.

Amazing things happen when you just let people live their lives and stop trying to micro-manage who gets to go where, or who can be friends with who. All of these amazing people were simply asking their government to stop waging war on the rest of the world in the name of "America." 50 years later, it feels like we've run out of creative ways to voice our opposition. That's why we scream at each other so much now, you know?

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