Yesterday's tomorrow according to Atari

Life is full of absurdity. War, congressional debate, Neil Young's Trans album. That's right, the one where he appropriates Kraftwerk. Uhh, whaaa? The story I heard is that he got a vocoder so that he could better communicate with his son who was born with cerebral palsy. It's a tender account, and it makes me think the album is more than a middle-finger-to-the-record-label act of career suicide. Who knows? Maybe it was that too. Maybe Neil wanted to get as far from himself as he could. Or maybe he got really into playing Atari. None of those layers apply to the album art, which packs in just about every lame signifier of "The Future" as any single image from the early '80s.

Meanwhile, I've got a birthday coming up, and you know, a vocoder wouldn't be the worst thing to find under a bow and wrapping paper. Just sayin.'

Neil Young - Computer Age