Questions to which I'm unlikely to get any useful answers from my readership, Part 1

A friend has given me twelve tracks to convince him that Neil Young is the greatest artist in popular music. He has other friends he has challenged to do the same with David Bowie and the Beatles. Their tasks aren't easy either, but, with all due respect, I think mine is the hardest. Neil Young has been incredibly prolific over his career - we're talking about a guy who has released more than thirty solo studio albums (the exact number depends on how you count), eight live albums, and about a half dozen albums as a member of other bands...and whose allegedly impending release of material from his archives is still eagerly anticipated because there's so much that he's recorded without releasing.

Put it another way: forget something as crude as evaluating his body of work and picking the best twelve songs, there are at least six albums that need to be represented by at least one song just by virtue of the strength of the whole album, and that doesn't include mandatory songs from otherwise unremarkable albums - think Like a Hurricane, Rocking in the Free World, and Cortez the Killer (yes, I'm calling On the Beach "otherwise unremarkable" - live with it). And hey, didn't he do some relatively notable stuff with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash & Young too? How am I supposed to find room for that?

And it's not just the prolificness, it's also the diversity: Young has dabbled in so many genres that any attempt to represent the best of his career in twelve songs is going to be hamstrung by the need to pick them from each category. There's the famous Electric Neil/Acoustic Neil dichotomy of course (you can count me as being slightly in the Acoustic Neil camp, but I'm sort of a weenie), but things are actually more nuanced than that. For example, I think there needs to be at least one ragged electric track with stupid and repetitive lyrics (Welfare Mothers, Fuckin' Up, Dirty Old Man, etc.), one surreal look back at characters from the new world's founding (Pocahontas, Cortez the Killer, Like an Inca, etc.), one protest song (Ohio, Campaigner, almost anything from Living with War, etc.), one song about artistic integrity (This Note's for You, Prisoners of Rock and Roll, Restless Consumer, etc.), one towering electric epic (okay, this one's easy now that Ordinary People has finally been released), and, if we really want a representative cross-section, one track that even the most forgiving Young fan can't get all the way through without cringing in embarrassment on Young's behalf (America the Beautiful, Old King, the entire Trans album, etc.). And hey, shouldn't his collaboration with Pearl Jam get some play?

In summary, Neil Young is clearly a better artist than Bowie or the Beatles. But I think I've got the hardest task all the same.

If there are any other Neil Young fans out there, some advice would be appreciated.