Neil Young

Neil Young emerged from the Canadian folk scene in the mid-1960s, first with Buffalo Springfield and then as a solo artist and intermittent member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His career is defined by radical unpredictability — acoustic folk masterpieces like Harvest sit alongside the scorched-earth guitar noise of Arc Weld and the electronic experiments of Trans. His guitar 'Old Black,' a 1953 Gibson Les Paul run through a Fender Deluxe amp cranked to feedback, produces a tone of controlled chaos that directly influenced grunge. Albums like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Rust Never Sleeps are canonical, but Young's willingness to alienate audiences with left-field choices keeps his catalog perpetually surprising. Crazy Horse, his backing band, match his ragged intensity with a loose, heavy attack. Kurt Cobain's suicide note quoted Young's lyric 'it's better to burn out than to fade away,' cementing his status as the spiritual ancestor of 1990s alternative rock.