"Hey Hey, My My " is a song written by Canadian-American musician Neil Young. Combined with its acoustic counterpart "My My, Hey Hey ", it bookends Young's 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. The song was influenced by the punk rockzeitgeist of the late 1970s, in particular by Young's collaborations with the American artpunk bandDevo, and what he viewed as his own growing irrelevance.
Origins
The song "Hey Hey, My My...", as well as the titular phrase of the album on which it was featured, "rust never sleeps," sprang from Young's collaborations with Devo and, in particular, the band's frontman, Mark Mothersbaugh. In 1977, Devo had been asked by Young to participate in the creation of his film, Human Highway, and a scene in the film shows Young playing the song in its entirety with Devo. On May 28, 1978 Young collaborated with Devo on a cacophonous version of "Hey Hey, My My " at the Different Fur studio in San Francisco and, would later introduce the song to Crazy Horse. During the Different Fur studio session, Mothersbaugh added the lyrics "Rust never sleeps", a slogan he remembered from his graphic arts career that promoted the automobile rust proofing product Rust-Oleum. Young adopted the line and used it in his Crazy Horse version of the song, as well as for the title of his album. The lyrics, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." were widely quoted by his peers and by critics. The line "It's better to burn out than it is to rust" is often credited to Young's friend Jeff Blackburn of The Ducks. Some critics viewed Young's career as declining after the release of 1977's American Stars 'N Bars and 1978's Comes a Time. With the explosion of punk rock in 1977, some punks had felt that Young and his contemporaries were becoming obsolete, with Young worrying that they were right. The death of Elvis Presley that same year compounded this, with the British punk band The Clash even stating, "No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones in 1977!" in their song "1977".
Content
Brad Tyer of Houston Press proclaimed "Hey Hey, My My" to be "proto-grunge grunt rock", stylistically.
The lyrics of the song, particularly the line "out of the blue and into the black", are an epigraph and are also featured prominently in Stephen King's novel It. The line, "It's better to burn out than to fade away", was included in Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide note in 1994. It is also referenced in Panic! At The Disco's "Nicotine", Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages", Hole's "Reasons to be Beautiful", :de:Bosse |Bosse's :de:Schönste Zeit|"Schönste Zeit", Meg Myers' "Some People" and spoken by Kurgan in the 1986 Fantasy Adventure film "Highlander".
