10 Rock Songs That Took Shots At Other Artists

One of the biggest rules behind Neil Young is that he does whatever the hell he wants. No matter what kind of style of rock music that you find him in, he dances to no one else's tune but his own and is looking to make the kind of music that he wants to listen to. That doesn't make for the greatest band dynamic though, and when Neil finally shook off the shackles of Crosby Stills and Nash, he wasn't exactly going to mince words about how he felt.

Even though Neil was doing well with Buffalo Springfield and his own solo career, his appearance with his friends on albums like Deja Vu gave them a much needed edge compared to the hippy sounds that they were making on their debut. As soon as Neil fell out with them though, his career throughout Harvest and After the Gold Rush made for something much more open and honest, including Rust Never Sleeps, which seemed to take shots at his old band directly.

While Neil isn't expected to have exactly warm feelings about his old bandmates, he basically destroys all of their credibility in just the first few lines of the song, saying that he needed to move out of their shadow and how they were just dead weight to him at this point. Compared to the folk tinged sounds of his work, this is almost punk rock in the way that it's leaving everything behind. Crosby Stills and Nash were now looking like the washed up hippies, and the era of the grunge godfather was upon us.