by Neil Young has long since established his legend.
He doesn’t need to prove anything anymore with his music; if he ever felt the need to prove himself in the first place, but these days he hits the headlines more often for his activism than for his new recordings. You will be as familiar with his calls to boycott certain brands as you are with songs like ‘Heart of Gold’, ‘After the Gold Rush’, ‘Harvest Moon’ and the maddeningly brilliant, never-ending, ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’.
Young has always taken a stand in his songs, and he stands on his words, as well. His 1970 album, Ohio, was inspired by an anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and, almost 40 years later, his album Living with War was a biting rebuke of George Bush and the illegal war he waged alongside Tony Blair and Britain in Iraq.
While it’s fair to say that most artists with right minds are against such wars, not as many are as keen to take a stand on the subject quite like Neil Young has so consistently done throughout his career. With all the obvious destruction of lives and land that these wars bring, though, Neil Young knows that such conflicts are not the only thing that we should all be taking a stand against.
Perhaps even more devastating to the people of the world and to the planet that we all live on are the effects of capitalism, mass consumerism and corporate greed. Neil Young knows as well as anyone, anyway, that war is just one of the mechanisms that capitalism uses to exert control over the masses, anyway. If you’re against one, then you should be against the other.
As an environmental activist and campaigner, Young has been a longtime vegetarian and, more recently, has adhered to a vegan diet. Since 2022, he has refused to play at venues that serve factory-farmed meat and dairy on-site. Considering that the meat and dairy industries are built on some of the most inhumane practices that human beings have ever conceived—92 billion animals are factory farmed annually around the world, with 80 billion of them being cruelly slaughtered each year—and one of the world’s biggest polluters (the breeding, slaughter and selling of livestock alone is responsible for at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gases per annum, more than all forms of transportation combined), so it’s no wonder that he would take such a stand against the meat and dairy industries.
As with his anti-war position, his environmental activism is also tied in with his stance on over-consumerism. It’s far from one of his greatest songs, but Young states it plain on ‘Piece of Crap’ when he sings that “I’m trying to save the trees, I saw it on TV. They cut the forest down to build a piece of crap”. Young included the song in his setlist at his 2019 show in London’s Hyde Park, performing alongside Bob Dylan, after he had threatened to pull out from the show entirely in a boycott against the event’s sponsor, Barclays Bank. Young cited their huge investment into fossil fuel industries, and their involvement in the destruction of our planet, as the reason he wouldn’t play a show they the sponsors of, while more recently, the BDS movement has called for a separate boycott on the banking group following an internal investigation which found that “Barclays now invests over £2 billion in, and provides financial services worth £6.1 billion to, companies arming Israel”.
Though so many of Neil Young’s songs, especially as he’s gotten older, have laid his worldview out in much clearer colours, his music is not always now the best vehicle for his activism, as he so often feels compelled to pull his catalogue from the streaming platforms where most people get their music.
First, it was Spotify that he removed his repertoire from. Young had always been disdainful of the streaming giants laissez-faire relationship with high quality audio, but it was a much more serious issue which led to him stepping back from the streaming platform. And, once again, you could hardly argue with Young’s reason for wanting to distance himself from the Swedish tech company.
Neil Young contracted polio, a highly infectious virus which attacks the nervous system and can cause paralysis, physical deformities and death, at the age of five in 1951. The illness has left him partially paralysed on his left side and with a permanent limp. Four years later, a life-saving vaccine was released, which massively cut back the spread of the virus and saved countless lives. How the young Neil Young must have wished he could have been spared his brush with the disease and had access to the vaccine himself. Fast forward 65 years and Young was incensed when Spotify signed an extortionate exclusive deal with misinformation super-spreader Joe Rogan at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and gave him a platform to question the efficacy of vaccinations against all-sorts of deadly virus’. Young demanded that his music be pulled from the platform in response, as did fellow Canadian—and fellow polio survivor—Joni Mitchell.
There are, of course, no shortage of reasons to stage a Spotify boycott of your own. From their terrible artist remuneration to their total cultural devaluing of music in modern life in general, to the proliferation of “ghost artists” and A.I generated “content” on the platform; CEO Daniel Ek’s massive investment into military A.I technology using money made from Spotify or allowing advertising from ICE and any number of other unfathomable sins, Spotify leave you no shortage of reasons to find a new streaming service quicker than you can say “New Music Friday”.
But, if you do opt to look for a new home for your playlists and want to keep on listening to Neil Young, you soon won’t find him on Amazon Music, either. Young has recently announced he’ll be pulling his music from the platform, in light of the increasingly close ties between Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos and America’s fascist president, Donald Trump. Young has also called for consumers to choose to shop locally, instead of heading to the Bezos-owned Whole Foods. Similarly, Young has called for a boycott on fellow insidious tech-tycoons who have climbed into bed with Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and their platforms Meta and X (better known as Twitter), respectively. Young has cited Meta’s “unconscionable use of chatbots with children” for his severance of ties with the company’s Facebook and Instagram websites, and concerns over the proliferation of anti-semitic content on X for his calls to quit using Musk’s platform.
These men—Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, among many others—have been instrumental in sewing the seeds of hate, division, violence, anger and doubt into the fabric of our modern society and culture. They are spearheading the biggest transfer of wealth, from the poor to the already super-rich, in all of human history, and they are laying waste to the only planet we have a hope to live on in the process. It’s no wonder, then, that a man of such deep morality, deep love for both people and planet, would rage against them and everything they own and stand for.
In a recent blog post, Young raised a call to arms against them and every destructive techno-fascist like them, saying, “”Forget Amazon and Whole Foods. Forget Facebook. Buy local. Buy direct. Bezos supports this government”, before adding, “don’t go back to the big corporations who have sold out America. We all have to give up something to save America from the Corporate Control Age it is entering. They need you to buy from them. Don’t”. And it’s not just Americans who should be listening to him, but all of us, the whole world over. We all deserve a brighter future than the one these corporations are carving out for us. We all deserve to keep on rockin’ in the free world.
