Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hey hey, my my --"[Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)]]" (1979) |
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"Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" is a rock song by Neil Young. Combined with its acoustic counterpart "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)", it bookends Young's successful 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. Inspired by proto-new wave group Devo, the rise of punk and what Young viewed as his own growing irrelevance, the song today crosses generations, inspiring admirers from punk to grunge and significantly revitalizing Young's then-faltering career. The song is about the alternatives of continuing to produce similar music ("to rust" or — in "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" — "to fade away") or to burn out, as John Lydon of the Sex Pistols did by abandoning his Johnny Rotten persona.
A part of a lyric from the song, "it's better to burn out than to fade away," became infamous in modern rock 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.
"Out of the blue and into the black" was a Vietnam War-era phrase that originally referred to jumping out of the daylight into the darkness of a Vietcong tunnel, and was later generalized to refer to various situations, including death.
