"My My, Hey Hey " is a song by Canadian musician Neil Young. An acoustic song, it was recorded live in early 1978 at the Boarding House in San Francisco, California. Combined with its hard rock counterpart "Hey Hey, My My ", it bookends Young's 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. Inspired by electropunk group Devo, the rise of punk and what Young viewed as his own growing irrelevance, the song significantly revitalized Young's career. The line, "it's better to burn out than to fade away," became infamous after being quoted in Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide note. Young later said that he was so shaken that he dedicated his 1994 album Sleeps with Angels to Cobain.
Legacy
Young compared the rise of Johnny Rotten with that of the recently deceased "King" Elvis Presley, who himself had once been disparaged as a dangerous influence only to later become an icon. Rotten returned the favour by playing one of Young's songs, "Revolution Blues" from On the Beach, on a London radio show, an early sign of Young's eventual embrace by a number of punk-influenced alternative musicians. The song may best be known for the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away". Kurt Cobain's suicide note ended with the same line, shaking Young and inadvertently cementing his place as the so-called "Godfather of Grunge". Ex-Beatle John Lennon commented on the message of the song in a 1980 interview with David Sheff from Playboy: Young would reply two years later when asked to respond to Lennon's comments:
The rock'n'roll spirit is not survival. Of course the people who play rock'n'roll should survive. But the essence of the rock'n'roll spirit to me, is that it's better to burn out really bright than to sort of decay off into infinity. Even though if you look at it in a mature way, you'll think, "well, yes... you should decay off into infinity, and keep going along". Rock'n'roll doesn't look that far ahead. Rock'n'roll is right now. What's happening right this second. Is it bright? Or is it dim because it's waiting for tomorrow—that's what people want to know. And that's why I say that.
Oasis covered the song on their 2000 world tour, including it on their live album and DVD Familiar to Millions. The band acknowledged Cobain's attachment to the song by dedicating it to him when they played it in Seattle on the sixth anniversary of his death. Scottish band Big Country recorded a version, which can be heard on their Under Covers album, and the remastered edition of their live album Without the Aid of a Safety Net. It is also used as live-intro to System of a Down's "Kill Rock 'n Roll" in some live performances. It is included on Neil Young's Greatest Hits album. Many other bands and singers have played or recorded covers of this song: System of a Down, Dave Matthews Band, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Battleme, Rick Derringer, Nomeansno, Mexican rock & roll band El Tri, Finnish glam rock bandNegative, Argentine rock band La Renga, Chromatics, Jake Bugg, Axel Rudi Pell on his 2014 album Into the Storm. Romanian act Fjord covered the song for their 2016 album Textures. Brazilian doom metal band HellLight recorded a version for an album of covers. Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo covered the song on their 2017 album Fall. The song is the title theme of Dennis Hopper's movie Out of the Blue. The song was included at number 93 in Bob Mersereau's book The Top 100 Canadian Singles.
Quotations
, singer for Hole and Cobain's widow, alludes both to this song and her husband's suicide note in the song "Reasons To Be Beautiful" from the albumCelebrity Skin. In "Reasons To Be Beautiful," she changes the verse to "It's better to rise than fade away." Def Leppard begins their song "Rock of Ages" with the lines "I got something to say / It's better to burn out than fade away"; the same lines were used in the movie Highlander by The Kurgan and used in the Queen song "Gimme The Prize " on their A Kind Of Magic album. Metalcore band Killswitch Engage have quoted the line in their song "New Awakening". The lyrics of the song, in particular "out of the blue and into the black", are an epigraph and also a prominent feature in Stephen King's It. Lana Del Rey mentions the song through the lyrics "out of the black, into the blue" on her song "Get Free" from her fifth studio albumLust for Life.
