Old Man Neil Young Chides New Music, Which Is Eye-Poppingly Surprising, Eh?

With his wrinkled, wizened face and ballbag neck, Neil Young is not a young man. In fact, he's incredibly old. He's always sung like he's Methuselah, making Bob Dylan sound like a fresh-faced operatic toddler.

Of course, the older you get, the more you find things bugging you. Automated phone systems, self-service tills and absolutely everything young people do find a way into your bile, erupting out in a volley of complaint.

So what's up with Neil Young now? Modern music, that's what. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like it in the same way his granddad would've hated his peers haircuts and music.

Young, a man who made a living out of making new records sound amazingly out-of-date when he released them (Harvest was the sound of '20s country and the less we say about his electronic album, the better) surprisingly doesn't find much joy in the current climate.

Neil said, while shouting at next door's kids for kicking their ball in his garden:

"I'm finding that I have a little bit of trouble with the quality of the sound of music today. I don't like it. It just makes me angry. Not the quality of the music, but we're in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we've ever had. It's worse than a 78 [rpm record]. Where are our geniuses? What happened?"

That'd be the sound of a 78 record that Young was once so keen to ape.

Either way, he's continued his whining, claiming that MP3s only feature 5 per cent of the data from an original master file, which he sees as a major problem.

"If you're an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 per cent great, but the consumer got 5 per cent, would you be feeling good? I like to point that out to artists. That's why people listen to music differently today. It's all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that's because in the resolution of the music, there's nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone."

"It's like Occupy Music – the 5 per cent, that's who we are now. We used to be the hundred per cent!"

Actually. That was quite a funny sign-off, which is irritating.