For What It's Worth

Something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. Stephen Stills looked at police in riot gear facing down teenagers outside nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard, and that’s what came out. Not a protest anthem. A weather report.

The Sunset Strip riots of 1966 seem almost quaint now—kids protesting curfew laws and club closures, cops overreacting, property owners wanting the riffraff gone. But Stills saw something universal in the local chaos. He saw what happens when authority and youth stop talking and start posturing. He saw the beginning of cracks that would split the whole country wide open.

The song is terrifying because it’s so calm. That guitar riff—three notes, hypnotic, circling—never resolves. The bass walks in a minor key. And Stills just observes. There’s a man with a gun over there. Battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. He doesn’t pick sides. He watches everyone lose.

Buffalo Springfield had Neil Young and Stephen Stills in the same band. They could have made this song explosive. Instead, they kept it at a whisper, and the whisper carried further than any scream. You lean in to hear it. That’s when it gets you.

Fifty-eight years later, the song still plays over footage of protests. Different decades, different causes, same fundamental fracture. Stills captured something permanent about American anxiety—the feeling that something’s happening here and we’re not going to like where it leads.

Some songs age. This one just keeps being relevant, which is the worst thing a warning can do.