Neil Young takes a stand
HE PRESENTS HIMSELF
TO THE PUBLIC AS AN
AFFABLE PALOOKA. — COLBY COSH
No doubt most of you have read of the war between the music streaming service Spotify and the Canadian rock ’n’ roll magus Neil Young. Earlier this week, the cantankerous Young decided he wanted his treasured oeuvre removed from Spotify because it also plays host to the most popular podcaster on earth, Joe Rogan.
Rogan has a track record of displaying skepticism about medical and social approaches to COVID-19, although if you’ve glanced at his show you know it doesn’t consist of endless Roganist political tirades: he is willing to have guests from the intellectual fringe on his show for interviews, and his own opinions seem to change from time to time, but he is quite careful to disclaim personal expertise. He presents himself to the public as an affable palooka who is just trying to figure things out, an approach that has built his personal cult to unfathomable dimensions.
One way or another, his behaviour became too much for Young, a polio survivor whose relationship with Spotify (and other music industry corporations) has always been difficult. He withheld his music from the streaming service for a while as it grew to become the 21st century’s answer to AM radio, believing that Spotify’s music webcasting was of unacceptably dismal quality.
Eventually, however, he had to accept that a musical artist has to meet listeners where they are, and he agreed to be Spotified. He told Rolling Stone that, “When I started making music, records sounded like God. It was great to give somebody a record, because it sounded great. It’s something that got right into your soul. (High-resolution) is the digital version of a good vinyl record. It’s better for the art.”
With controversy raging over Rogan and some of his guests, however, Young has now decided that his instincts were sound all along. He published an open letter, since deleted, containing uncategorical instructions to his record label and his manager: “let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform.”
Spotify obliged Young politely, even eagerly, while expressing the hope that he would soon be back on the service. Young’s music continues to be available for streaming on rival services, including Apple Music. (Who could have any ethical problem with Apple, am I right? Why, I’m using an Apple desktop computer to watch Youtube clips of Joe Rogan’s show right now!)
Readers hoping to understand Neil Young’s position can still consult an editorial he wrote for his personal website. He seems to consider Spotify as being a hypnotizing vector for the mass distribution of COVID-19 misinformation, and indeed he sounds quite a bit like the Joe Rogan guest who accused the media and public health establishments of propagating “mass formation psychosis.”
Young states all but explicitly that Joe Rogan wouldn’t have such overwhelming credibility among listeners without the Spotify imprimatur — a frankly silly thing to imply. Refresh my memory, Neil: did Rogan pay Spotify US$100 million ($128 million) to join forces with it, or was it the other way around?
This affray naturally presents itself to the media and the public as part of ongoing Sturm und Drang over the social responsibility of media platforms. Young seems to be taking a maximalist position: if you sell your music to Spotify, you are accepting responsibility for everything else that Spotify distributes. This seems like a pretty sizable burden, considering that Spotify distributes three million podcasts.
But Young is walking the walk. His decision will, as he says, carry a significant, immediate, personal cash cost. He nowhere proposes to set out rules of conduct for anybody but Neil Young, and that warrants admiration.
It’s worth observing that Rogan isn’t trying to set an example for anybody, either: when he got in trouble for saying that fit young people might not want to rush to get vaccinated, he renounced his comments and called himself a “f---ing moron” who is “not a respected source of information, even for me.”
The problem, if there is one, is perhaps not so much with Neil Young, but with the endless number of journalists hurling themselves forward to celebrate him as a beacon of eagle-eyed anti-corporate ’60s spirit. Surely this is recognizable as the same ’60s spirit that has turned other rock stars of Young’s generation into babbling critics of big government and pharmaceutical companies? Was the Age of Aquarius meant to end up with a choosing of sides between Pfizer Inc. and Spotify? Perhaps it is only the grace of God that separates Neil Young from Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, after all.