I
have dirty little secret I actually like some Neil Young songs even though he's
a notorious asshole.
Not
those race-baiting songs he plays, but many of those other songs that aren’t
full of hate and misinformation.
Most
people these days didn’t even know who Neil Young was until he went on a rant against
Spotify.
Many
of those who know him hate him. Even
some of the people that he's played with dislike him.
Those
who profess to like him are riding his coattails in order to get attention for
themselves, many of whom most likely would be kneeling at sports games during
the national anthem.
But
Neil Young’s stance against Spotify is very symbolic of his duplicity since now
we're beginning to see his real motivations for opposing alternative
information regarding covid – and it has little to do with supposed
misinformation and a lot to do with profit he and the company who oversees his
songs make off his collection
People mockingly point out that he probably
makes very little money off of Spotify and so removing his stuff is not a
financial burden.
What
is not said is that the company that owns Pfizer apparently owns a majority of
his songs and so he made will have a reason for opposing alternative
information other than this moral Crusade he appears to be on.
The
fact that he has become an icon for the ultra-left and has attracted all those
celebrities and musicians who want to get back on the Hit Parade is also
ignoring some key details as to his apparent homophobic past.
Or perhaps reveals some aspect to his character
that people didn't realize before.
Back in 1985 during the height of AIDS epidemic
Neil Young went on a rant against homosexuals obviously displaying his terror
at possibly coming down with AIDS by having some gay guy in a supermarket touch
potato he may eventually eat.
Neil
Young has always been a mean SOB. But perhaps people are reading him wrong, that
he isn't homophobic, that he is just a scared little kid terrified that he's
going to catch something.
Most
likely he was that kid in grammar school who was always afraid he might catch
the cooties.
This
psychological need to remove anything offensive in his life may explain some of
his outlandish and inaccurate depictions of slavery in songs like Alabama and
Southern Man.
You
might think he is covering a deep internal prejudice of his own and needs
desperately to compensate for his own personal racism by writing anthems
against slavery, thus alleviating guilty feelings he might have about being a
closet racist. He may even have an unjustified fear that his hatred for black
people is based on the same fear he has of COVID and AIDS, that someone that
blackness is contagious and might rub off on him.
This
unreasonable fear and suppressed racism may even be based on some awful
experience he had up in the extreme whiteness of Canada where he was raised –
the kind of white guilt many liberals feel, even though they have had rare
contact with African Americans and are basing their guilt on phony stereotypes.
What is clear,
however, is that Neil Young desperately needs to feel hip, and to be part of
the inner circle of some movement that will make
him seem socially aware.
This may
explain why he has jumped on so many radical bandwagons over the years, from
environmentalism and the anti-war movement to Civil Rights and now Woke – even though
he leaped on all of these late.
He
appears desperate to make up for this and may explain why he’s charging head
with censoring conservatives on Spotify. Through his whole career, he was the
odd man out, the one who did not get credit on the Crosby Stills and Nash album;
the man who keeps trying to reinvent himself in order to still seem relevant.
This obsession apparently is part of the motivation
for him withdrawing his songs from Spotify as well putting you back on top and an
icon of the new Woke movement
Yet ultimately, we should not judge Neil Young badly
because all this seems to add up to a really deep psychological issue for him,
something he needs to work out in the public by attacking other people. Perhaps
we should feel sorry for him for that little boy deep inside who is scared and
lonely and hates to be hated and needs to compensate somehow for all of that
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