40 years ago today (August 28th), two Neil Young albums were certified gold: Decade, his triple-disc best-of, and Rust Never Sleeps, which is bookended by “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” The line “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” is one of the most famous and debated rock lyrics. (It is only sung in full in the song’s acoustic counterpart, “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).”) It drew scorn from John Lennon and was cited by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. Here’s what Neil Young has to say about why he wrote it.
“People want a star to be flashy and they want something that they don’t have to relate to as being human — you have your moment, then you go away. But stars are supposed to represent something else, I guess, in sort of a super quality of it’s great and once it isn’t great, people don’t want to hear about it, because it doesn’t satisfy your illusion. They want something to be bigger than life, or whatever. That’s where that came from. It’s better to burn out than to fade away, or rust, because it makes a bigger flash in the sky.”
