re: Did you know Neil Young apologized for his Nazi arse lyrics in "Southern Man" & "Alabama"?

I’m not really a big Neil young fan as I always hated his vocals but I’m having a hard time connecting anything in these lyrics to something “nazi”. I feel folks have gotten a little irresponsible with the use of “nazi”. Just because you don’t agree with something being said, or in this case sung, doesn’t mean it has nazi undertones.

Also, Sweet Home Alabama fricking blows. The rest of their catalog on the other hand…

Jim Croce, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, and Lynyrd Skynard were all taken by plane crashes before their full potential could be reached.

I remember reading about his apology at least twenty years ago.
And guess what? He really didn't say anything that bad. The song is a reaction to a lot of shitty things that happened in Alabama in the sixties:
the Brimingham church bombing - killing 4 little girls, defying school segregation laws, the beating of marchers and protesters, etc.

Nothing on this entire site seems not to be polluted by right-wing politics...

Lynyrd Skynyrd were not from Alabama... they were stuck there - in Muscle Shoars - recording and after a lot of touring were homesick, so instantly that's a layer of sarcasm to the lyrics... Ed King, the bassist on the first record who switched to guitar, wrote the music to the song. He was a certified San Francisco hippie Liberal whom they met when they opened for his previous band, Strawberry Alarm Clock ("Incense and Peppermints") in the 60s, when Skynyrd was a psychedelic band, too. They didn't hate Alabama, they just wanted to be back in Jacksonville, FL (or San Francisco or Atlanta for Ed King). Skynyrd were hippies... they didn't like George Wallace ("BOO BOO BOO!!!!") or segregation... They did, however, LOVE Neil Young... and they idolized black musicians.

"We wrote 'Sweet Home Alabama' as a joke," Van Zant clarified a few years following the release. "We didn't even think about it. The words just came out that way. We just laughed like hell and said, 'Ain't that funny.' We love Neil Young. We love his music."

Neil apologized for painting with too broad of a brush... but I've never met anybody who didn't realize whether or not they were who was being described in those songs.

I've also been in Alabama (granted, in the "Liberal" enclaves of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and Auburn/Opelika and Huntsville/Decatur and Mobile around artsy Liberal college students) when both of the Neil Young songs were played someplace and people didn't react negatively... however, at the first notes of the guitar riff to "Sweet Home Alabama" they yell expletives.

Next, Robbie Robertson, a Liberal Canadian who was Indigenous and Jewish, wrote "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down": out of fascination that poor Southerners - and particularly Levon Helm's family - had some misplaced pride in the Confederacy, even though it completely fricked them in every way imaginable when it existed.

“A southern man don’t need him around any how”.

This is not entirely new news.

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Neil may not know digital audio(although I suspect he does), but his songwriting demonstrates intelligence…

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That's what you'd think. Songwriting prowess doesn't necessarily equate to intelligence. This is the fallacy the general public falls into. "Oh they are good at this thing, therefore they MUST be smart".

As someone who has worked with some very talented musicians, this is patently not true.

And Neil doesn't know crap about digital audio. "When they made the algorithm for digital audio there was a mistake... and they never fixed it" (paraphrase)

Abject moron when talking about digital audio.

I don't think you know what a Nazi is.

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Also, Sweet Home Alabama fricking blows

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For sure overplayed, but an outstanding, generational classic song. There is a reason it is still among the most played songs from that era.