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They say rock ’n’ roll will never die. But what if rock isn’t an idea, but a man?

Allow me to explain. Looking back at the rock music canon, a number of artists grasped the parts but not the whole: The Beatles helped develop the pop song, as well as a healthy desire to test the genre’s limits, Bob Dylan reinvented folk, and Led Zeppelin showed what guitars are capable of.

There are dozens more, even from fairly recent times. One must look no further than Radiohead’s “OK Computer” or Nirvana’s “In Utero” to see what rock can still accomplish.

There’s one man, though, who has always personified what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be. He’s a transplanted Canadian who’s often known as the godfather of grunge, and has an angry new album with a song titled “Let’s Impeach the President.” His name is Neil Young.

Young has no shortage of rock credentials. He was a founding member of the seminal Buffalo Springfield, the band that also included Stephen Stills and was responsible for “For What it’s Worth.” He also performed at Woodstock with his band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and along with his sometimes-band Crazy Horse, he’s released scores of classic albums.

Still, Dylan has plenty of good records too. What makes Young so important is not so much what he does, as the way he does it.

Young has always been true to both the balladic and ferocious aspects of rock music with his blend of gentle folk and abrasive guitar firestorms. It’s his sympathetic heart and uncompromising ethos that have made him so relevant.

Back in the 1970s, Young recorded and released music at a furious pace, releasing eight albums between 1969 and 1975 – arguably his most creative period. At that rate, Beck and Radiohead should have about 20 albums apiece by now.

In an era in which albums and singles are marketed and promoted through payola for longer than it takes to write and record them, the only recent artist to match Young’s prolificacy is Ryan Adams – who got away with releasing three albums last year because his label has long since given up on him ever putting out anything commercial.

Much the same thing happened to Young after the “Harvest” album. Having passed on attempting to match the success of his most popular work, he followed his muse and recorded an electronic, vocoder and synthesizer-based album (“Trans”) and a rockabilly set entitled “Everybody’s Rockin.’”

Young was sued by Geffen Records for making “unrepresentative” music – essentially, for not sounding like Neil Young.

Incredibly, that kind of independent spirit remains unequalled 37 years after the release of his first solo work. His new album, “Living with War,” is a perfect example of everything Young – and indeed, rock ’n’ roll – stands for.

Always one to shirk expectations, Young has released the hard-rocking “Living with War” hot on the heels of last year’s folky, mortality-ruminating “Prairie Wind.” Like “Prairie Wind,” Young wrote and recorded the new album quickly, but the lightning-quick turnaround between his March recording sessions and this week’s CD release is virtually unprecedented in the clunky modern era. The full album has already been available in free-streaming audio on his Web site.

More important, though, is the record’s content. The music of “Living with War” captures the aging musician at his most passionate and fiery, churning through waves of distortion with an ease not even Young-disciple Pearl Jam captured on its own new protest album.

And protest album it is. The record is an unflinchingly direct look at U.S. politics and the war in Iraq, specifically a look at President Bush. In “Let’s Impeach the President,” he sings “Let’s impeach the president for lying / And leading our country into war / Abusing all the power that we gave him / And shipping all our money out the door.”

It gets more vehement, with further verses about wiretapping and the racial politics of Hurricane Katrina. The words are simple, and the message clear and undisguised. With all due respect to Bruce Springsteen, no one in recent memory has delivered songs this powerful, aimed directly at the common man.

The problem is that Young, at 60 years of age, might be the last of his breed. No one before or since has captured the spirit of rock better, from the sense of teenage rebellion and naive discovery to the unrelenting passion for one’s beliefs.

For the moment, Neil Young seems unstoppable, but he won’t be around forever. Let’s not let his legacy fade away.

Greenwald rocks out to “I Am a Child.” E-mail him at

dgreenwald@media.ucla.edu.