Song Of The Day 10/18/2016: Neil Young – “Crime In the City (Sixty to Zero Part 1)”

Extra Long – Ahhh, man, if I don't get back to the theme weeks now I'm just going to sleepwalk through these last five-plus months like a New York Jet on Monday Night Football. This week I'm going to throw you some very long pop and rock songs. I thought eight minutes or more was a good floor, because "American Pie" is eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, and if you can endure those metaphors over the same amount of time that you nuke a Hungry Man dinner, well good Lord you can endure mine.

"Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero Part 1)" may be my favorite song of that length of all time. It's surely in the top five. It's from Neil Young's 1989 album Freedom, which got his full credibility back after he spent most of the '80s basically pranking David Geffen at $15 a CD. The great thing about "Crime in the City" is how verses 2, 4 and (for the most part) 5 don't describe any actual criminal activity. You have to figure out what's criminal about the situations described. Especially verse 2, the literal synopsis of which concerns a record producer who's building a song backwards, a practice that's more popular now than ever.