Neil Young - Out of the Blue, Into the Black

Death, Resurrection, and the Eternal Rot of Rock and Roll

Dead Kings and Rotten Princes

Neil Young doesn’t care if you get it. He never has. In 1979, while America’s cultural seams were splitting under the weight of stagflation, post-Vietnam disillusionment, and the rising punk wave, Young sat down to write Rust Never Sleeps, an album designed as a love letter, a critique, and a funeral dirge for rock and roll. Central to this was the pair of songs: My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) and Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black). These two tracks didn’t just exist on the record; they were the record—conceptually, spiritually, sonically. Together, they’re an ouroboros, endlessly devouring and recreating the corpse of rock and roll.

It begins with an invocation, a hushed acknowledgment of the ghosts that haunt the genre’s history: “The King is gone but he’s not forgotten.” Elvis. A titan who gave rock and roll its first pretty face. By 1979, Elvis was dead and embalmed in the American psyche, both as a cultural hero and a cautionary tale of excess. Neil Young tips his hat to The King but doesn’t grovel. This is no sentimental eulogy. Instead, it’s a cold, clinical autopsy: Elvis gave rock its spark, but he also set the stage for its corporate defilement - a once-rebellious art form embarrassing themselves nightly in sequins and Vegas impersonators.

Then the UK gives us Johnny Rotten, the anti-Elvis, who turned the entire edifice of rock stardom on its head. Rotten and the Sex Pistols didn’t ascend to stardom; they blew up the concept, spat in the face of every pretender to the throne, and proclaimed the death of everything Elvis had built. By pairing Rotten with Presley, Young isn’t making a cheap comparison. He’s framing a continuum: the king who created the spectacle and the punk who torched it all in one glorious, nihilistic blaze.

Young is neither sentimental nor dismissive. He understands that both men, Elvis and Rotten, are critical to the evolution of rock and roll. Elvis laid the groundwork, and Rotten tore it down. What’s left, Young seems to ask, when the flames die out?

Deconstruction by Firelight

My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) opens with an acoustic dirge that feels like it should be played on the steps of a bombed-out cathedral. The lyrics mourn rock and roll’s descent into banality while celebrating its power to disrupt and inspire. It’s a stripped-down lament, a meditation on the entropy of a genre that began as a howl of rebellion but had become bloated with excess.

This acoustic version is a requiem for the old guard, a quiet acknowledgment that the era of innocence and unfiltered creation is over. Young isn’t pleading for a return to form. He’s observing the rot with a mix of melancholy and awe - a mad scientist marveling at the beauty of decay.

The electric counterpart, Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), is the other side of the coin — a violent, sludgy roar that obliterates the quiet mourning of its predecessor. The distortion is thick and unrelenting, the rhythm punishing, the vocals raw and defiant. This isn’t a funeral; it’s a resurrection by fire, dragging rock and roll kicking and screaming into a new era.

Here, Young isn’t mourning the death of rock and roll. He’s celebrating its ability to self-destruct and emerge stronger. The electric guitar becomes a weapon, a tool of creation and destruction that points forward to the grunge movement — a genre that would take Young’s blueprint and run it through a meat grinder of disillusionment and alienation.

Saluting the Punk Revolution

By the late 1970s, punk had slammed into the public consciousness like a Molotov cocktail. Angry and unapologetically DIY, it remains a stark rejection of the bombastic stadium rock that had come to define the genre. Young’s nod to Rotten is more than a casual reference; it’s an acknowledgment that punk had reclaimed the soul of rock and roll.

Punk didn’t care about guitar solos or million-dollar production values. It was about energy, immediacy, and truth. Young recognized that even as he worked within the broader framework of rock, his own ethos aligned more closely with the punks than with the bloated dinosaurs of the mainstream, many of whom he directly inspired, mentored, or even played with. His music on Rust Never Sleeps embraces the defiance of punk without sacrificing his identity.

Young doesn’t mimic punk; he distills its essence. In Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), you can feel the same sneering disdain for pretense and conformity that drove bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash. The message is clear: rock and roll isn’t about nostalgia or polish. It’s about defiance.

Blueprints

Here’s where Neil Young’s prescience becomes terrifying. Listening to Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), you can hear the seeds of grunge. The crushing guitar riff, the brutal production, the lyrical themes of despair and defiance — it’s all on full display. Kurt Cobain famously quoted Young’s “better to burn out than to fade away” in his suicide note, cementing the song’s connection to grunge’s tragic core, much to Young’s heartbreak.

Young predicted grunge’s rise. In 1979, nobody was talking about the existential crises of disillusioned youth in Seattle. But Young, in his ragged wisdom, saw where rock and roll was heading. He saw the need for a new kind of catharsis — a heavier, darker, and more introspective sound that was unlike anything that had come before.

Grunge was certainly not about technical perfection or rock star swagger; it was about feeling something real in a world that had gone numb. That’s what Young captures in these songs: the primal scream of a generation that refuses to fade quietly into the night.

Rust Never Sleeps

Ultimately, these songs are about survival. Not comfortable, complacent survival, but the painful, messy, desperate kind. Neil doesn’t offer any answers. He doesn’t promise that rock and roll will rise again or that the punks will save us. What he offers is a warning: rust never sleeps.

Everything corrodes, even the things we hold sacred. The only way to keep rock and roll alive is to let it burn, to embrace its impermanence, and to keep reinventing it, even if it means tearing it down to its foundations.

With My My, Hey Hey and Hey Hey, My My, Neil Young doesn’t offer rock and roll a mirror to gaze into — he grabs it by the throat and shoves its face into the cold, hard surface of its own decay. He doesn’t weep over the rot; he shreds it to pieces and stitches something raw and new from the remnants. In that act of brutal creation, he secures his place as one of its immortals — not by worshipping its history, but by understanding that sometimes the only way to keep it alive is to set it on fire and dance in the ashes.