This video is sponsored by Skillshare, the first 500 people to go to skl.sh slash polyphonic 15 will get two months of Skillshare absolutely free. When people think of great musicians, we tend to place them in a specific historic period or Define them as a monolithic archetype. Elvis Presley is the king. Johnny Cash is the man in black, Bob Dylan, the voice of a generation. But there are some artists that we just can't put our finger on and I think no artist embodies that better than Neil Young. Neil Young has meant a dozen different things to his audiences. He's worked with Rick James and David Crosby He was a hippie icon, but also the godfather of Grunge. He's name dropped Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Rotten and bin name dropped by Leonard Skinnerd and Kurt Cobain. Through a half century career, Young has put his fingers all over popular music, leading many of us to ask the same questions. Who exactly is Neil Young? And what exactly is his place in our cultural landscape? Let's take a closer look. Perhaps the reason it's so difficult to define Neil Young is because of the contradictions in his music. Ask somebody to describe Young's music and they'll probably give you one of two descriptions. The first is a calm, subdued music, acoustic guitars, thoughtful folk with a country tangy. The second is a roaring, loud artist, sludgy guitars and low, heavy mixings. Of course, Young himself has leaned into this dichotomy before. It's the driving theme behind the Russ Never Sleep's live album. That album features one acoustic side from Young on his own, followed by a grungy electric side with Crazy Horse. The point is driven home by the first and last tracks on the album. The songs are alternate universe versions of each other, a Yinyong pair showing how Young can consolidate two sides of himself into one. And this is one of the things that gives Young his strength. Other artists have oscillated between acoustic and electric. Dylan's bringing it all back home is famous for just that. But if you can do it with Neil Young's cohesion, Young's acoustic music seems to tap into a rustic escape to a pastoral countryside, but he's also always been at the cutting edge of technology. This is evident on the controversial trends, a strange electronic tinged album. Young adopted quickly to digital and was even on the forefront of the high fidelity movement with his own audio player, the Pono. But it goes beyond the tech. Neil Young is also woven into the fabric of two different countries. He's revered in his native Canada and often slips references of his home country into his lyrics. The opening lines of helpless might be the most famous example of this. And while Neil Young is name dropped beside Canadian grates like Leonard Cohen and Gord Downey, his music has also tied him to the cultural history of the United States. Though he didn't write it, Neil Young's guitar on Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth, provided a soundtrack to the American 60s counter-culture movement. Four years after that song, Young would write a protest song against the backdrop of one of America's bleakest historical moments. It was Young's lyrics that propelled Crosby Stills' National Young's Ohio, a historical document of the Kent station. And that political edge is something that has remained in Young's music regardless of time or sound. In his solo work, Young was a staunch critic of racism in the American South. Both Southern Man and Alabama tackled that issue hand-off. Neil Young's protest songs go outside of just one era, though. He's been writing political songs across several historical periods. One of his most famous protest songs, Rockin' in the Free World, was released two decades after Young's time in the 60s counter-culture. Rockin' in the Free World is a rally against George H. W. Bush's America. It even references the elder Bush's inaugural address. And Neil Young would stick around long enough to criticize H. W. Bush's son, too. In 2006, he sang Let's Impete the President about George W. Bush, part of an entire album protesting the war on terror. Neil Young can do anger with the best of them, but he can also do calm introspection. This has stuck with him across several points in his career and several bands. In his early days in the Canadian folk scene, he wrote Sugar Mael, a calm reflection on age. This is a theme that would return in 1972's Old Man. His time with Crosby Stills' Nash and Young saw him sing of escaping to the country on helpless, and those country themes returned on 1992's Harvest Move. Harvest Harvest Move. And despite being 20 years apart, heart of gold and one of these days work perfectly together as reflections on Young's life and his relationships. With all of these different styles and influences, you'd think that Neil Young might fit alongside David Bowie in the Chameleon archetype. But he's not quite like that. Bowie's hippie songs of the 60s are a far cry from his experimental jazz of 2016. But for Neil Young, 2017's The Visitor, still contains all of his signatures. It opens on a heavy grunge rant against Donald Trump, but two tracks later, he's calmed down to the harmonica driven, almost always. Almost always shows the subdued acoustic guitar work that has guided the calmer parts of Neil Young's career. Though people aren't quick to put him up with Hendrix or Clapton, when it comes to the all-time great guitarists, Young can hold his own against the best of them, on both acoustic and electric guitar. Some of Young's finest moments come in the form of open songs that let his guitar arrangements breathe. Tracks like Down By The River and Cortez The Killer show that Young is capable of stretching out long, passionate solos. In the end, the reason we don't have any clear idea of Neil Young may simply be because he defies his definition. He's a Canadian icon who has helped shape American history. He's an outwardly angry political rocker, equally capable of calm reflection. He's a legendary solo artist who's just as well known as part of several bands. He was a hippie in the 60s, a country singer in the 70s, and a grunge pioneer in the 80s. But through all these contradictions, there's something consistent at Neil Young's core. He manages to wrangle all of these different identities into one unique figure, distinct to anyone who knows him upon just a few seconds of listening. So try as we may, there's really only one monolithic identity that we can apply to Neil Young. Above all else, Neil Young is, and always has been, Neil Young. Listening to Neil Young has always inspired me to try and learn new things on the guitar. 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