"Lost Cause" - Beck

I saw this song the other night on Night Videos on MTV. I don't watch MTV much since I hate it so I have never seen this video before. Is it new?

I just fell in love with the video and the song immediately. The video was so original and so dreamy and suited the song so well. And the song was so beautiful. Beck can sometimes be so annoying to me since his music often tends to be more about style and genre-mixing than about nerve and soul. But I know that he has a more acoustic down to earth style and this song definately falls into that category. Such a beautiful song... I wish I could buy the video, not just the cd.

Have you seen this video? "Lost Cause" by Beck? In the video there's a robot with a picture of Beck's face on the helmet flying and hovering in the air. Then small parachute robots fly out from the big robot's body and then there's some fireworks going on too. It sounds really weird and it is too, but it's such a nice video together with the music. What's the matter with you?? So I'm in love with this video, so what?!?!?!

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

I've just got this song! (I know at last....) but I haven't seen the video. The song is so lovely wow.

Keep this thread open forsingle songs so we can discuss one song at a time, that gives us a chance to get it before we move on to another.

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instrumental rock band that I am in.

Glad you liked the song.

Today when I was getting my laundry together I listened to the album "Zuma" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse (a classic). The song "Cortez the Killer" is just so beautiful and sad. I always think of how the europeans have slaughtered and exploited the rest of the world so much when I hear that song. It's not that I feel guilty for being european or that I think "someone is gonna pay!" when I hear it. It just makes me think and makes me in a melancholic mood. And what a ****ing guitarplayer Neil is.....

Here's the lyrics by the way:


Cortez the Killer (Words & music: Neil Young)

He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the new world
In that palace in the sun

On the shore lay Montezuma
With his coca leaves and pearls
In his halls he often wandered
With the secrets of the worlds.

And his subjects gathered 'round him
Like the leaves around a tree
In their clothes of many colours
For the angry gods to see.

And the women all were beautiful
And the men stood straight and strong
They offered life in sacrifice
So that others could go on.

Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones

They carried them to the flatlands
And they died along the way
But they built up with their bare hands
What we still can't do today.

And I know she's living there
And she loves me to this day
I still can't remember when
Or how I lost my way.

He came dancing across the water
Cortez, Cortez
What a killer.

I don't want to completely go off course with this thread, but Beck's whole new album{Sea Change) is brilliant. And I also am a lover of the Lost Cause video and song. As well as Neil Young's Cortez the Killer. Two excellent choices to throw out there.


And with that I leave.

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You're not hopeless...

That's not off course. Not at all.

I have to check out the Beck album. I've heard that "Lost Cause" is pretty representative for the whole album, which sounds promising. That song proves that Beck Hansen is a gifted singer/songwriter, not only an intelligent, experminental genre mixer. (ew.... that sounded so pretentious...)

Which are your favourite Neil Young songs, Henry? (And everybody else too of course)

I just got Cortez the Killer, I've been meaning to get into Neil Young for quite a while now. The song reminds me of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. Fantastic.

Listen to Joy Division - Decades, it is a brilliant song. The only way i could describe it would be to say it sounds like faces in the dark haunting your youth in it's past to bring your present to decay.

Mini, you should check out the song "Open Those Eyes" with the swedish group Isolation Years. It gives me a little Joy Division vibes. I don't know if it's the singing or the keyboards. It's a great song anyway.

"Wish You Were Here" is one of my all time favourite songs by the way. Masterpiece! Can't really see the connection to "Cortez the Killer" though... Hmmmmm.... Interesting... An advice: Check out the Young records from the 70's first. They are his best work. I also think that "Neil Young Unplugged" is a terrific introduction to him. In fact, that's one of his best albums if you ask me. It covers all of his carreer up to 1992 or something. I don't know what you prefer. His acoustic side, his rock side, his country/folk side or his weird side. But on "Unplugged" he plays terrific acoustic versions of a lot of his best songs. Some of them, like "The Old Laughing Lady" and "Like a Hurricane", even better than the original versions.

With someone who went through so many eras, there is almost an infinite number. From his 80s era of grunge-like rock, I don't think anyone could touch Rockin in the Free World(Freedom, arguably his best). Early seventies brought songs like Southern Man(After the Gold Rush), 1972 had Old Man and Heart of Gold(Off of Harvest, a slightly overrated album, and 1975 brought Cortez the Killer(Zuma). However, even though some of his albums are sub-par, there is always at least one song that stikes me.



By the way, check out Beck-The Golden Age or Guess I'm Doin Fine if you want to hear a little more of the album before you buy. It is completely and utterly beautiful, along with being different from anything he has ever done before it.

"Freedom" is an overseen and underrated album and "Keep On Rockin' In the Free World" is the reason to why I discovered Neil Young. His appearance together with Pearl Jam on MTV Music Awards ('92 or '93) doing that song is the best musical moment ever aired on tv ever. I mean, this old guy with amazing sideburns and this incredible indian necklace just went onstage and played the crap out of all the grunge dudes. I can still feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck thinking about it. The album "Mirrorball" (1995) which he did with Pearl Jam as back up band is occasionally brilliant, especially in songs like "Song X", "The Ocean" and "Peace and Love".

About "Harvest", I think it is pretty much as good as people mostly say. It's a very even album with a very high quality level. Not one bad song. This is also a very good introduction to Young since it has several of his styles on it. I think it's definately a must-have for every musiclover.

If I had to pick one single Young album as my favourite, I think I'd have to say "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979). It has two problems though: "Welfare Mothers" and "Sedan Delivery", two of his worst songs. (It's said he tried to be a little punk-rock). But the vinyl-nerds talk about "the best A-side ever", which is possible. "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)", "Thrasher", "Ride My Llama", "Pocahontas" and "Sail Away" are all very very beautiful songs - all pretty much acoustic. The b-side could have been even better without the two mentioned songs, but "Powderfinger" and "My My, Hey Hey (Into the Black)" are still two of Young & Crazy Horse's finest moments, "Powderfinger" perhaps being the best Young song ever (to me). I almost cried when they played it as the very last encore when I saw him in the summer of 2001 here in Sweden.

Some of Young's albums are only available on vinyl, "The Missing Six", and some of them, of course, are among his best work. The Missing Six are "Journey Through the Past" (1972), "Time Fades Away" (1973), "On the Beach" (1974), "American Stars & Bars" (1977), "Hawks and Doves" (1980) and "Re-ac-tor" (1981). I think both the very dark "On the Beach" and "American Stars & Bars" (with songs like "Like a Hurricane") are super. You can get them on bootleg on cd though, but I think it's time for Neil to release these treasures to the common mortals.

I just got Beck's 'Sea Change' Album and apart from the tracks you mentioned Henry, I wasn't impressed. Lost Cause makes the album then 'The Golden Age' comes in for a loose second.

Oh well, just got Turin Brakes 'The Optimist' Album, ain't listened to it as yet.

Very strange. I have run into very few people who have anything short of loved it, very rare people to find that they don't like it at all. I bought it something like 3 or 4 months ago and still listen to it constantly. If you're not a fan of folk rock, however, I could see that it wouldn't quite be for you.

My personal favorites are;Guess I'm Doin Fine, Paper Tiger, and End of the Day. Every other song on the album is geat, these just stick out the most.

Those are the stories I love to hear about Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam single-handedly led me into loving 2 of my 5 favortie musicians of all time, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. I remember my brother went to see a Pearl Jam concert way many years ago and came back talking about some song we had never heard of called "Masters of War", naturally, this was early early Napster days and we typed it in, to find it by Bob Dylan. From then on, I loved Bob Dylan.

They're version of Rockin in the Free World helped me discover Neil Young as well.


I'm not as big a fan of them as I used to be, but I owe them a lot for helping me to discover so much.

Yeah, I used to be a Pearl Jam fan too, but I quit listening to them after "Vs". Don't know why really since they do a lot of music nowadays that's way better than a lot of the songs on "Ten" and "Vs". But songs like "Black" don't grow on trees, do they?

Aaah, Napster.. Those were the days! The bigger the artist, the bigger the chance you would find it there. "Masters of War" is a great track. I have still a lot to discover when it comes to Dylan, but I've heard enough to acknowledge him as the greatest rock lyricsist of all times. A marvelous storyteller worthy the Nobel Prize.