By David Cohen
Opinion - You probably feel the kerfuffle over the departure of Neil Young from Spotify has now been going on for longer than one of the popular performer's guitar solos, but in one respect at least there's still a bit more to the picture than meets the eye.
Neil Young (pictured) has gone from Spotify as have, reportedly, more than 100 of Joe Rogan's previous podcasts. Photo: AFP
Hasn't it been fascinating to see how relatively little tangible support from fellow musicians and artists that the Canadian seems to have received for yanking his songs off the music-streaming platform?
At the very least, Young must have been expecting a veritable who's who of the rock establishment hastily assembling together beside him on the media stage, like they once did in the Martin Scorsese-directed Last Waltz, for a literal performance of Sounds of Silence. At which point the fans, also in solidarity, would also quit the building, leaving Daniel Ek alone and unloved with the $3.2 billion fortune he has amassed from running the Spotify operation.
Okay, so Joni Mitchell has lent her name to the cause. Not forgetting the slew of elderly gents with familiar-sounding last names - that would be Mr Crosby, Mr Stills and Mr Nash. Plus the guitarist Nils Lofgren! But all of these people are already part of the Young circle in one way or another. Where are the others? Where's Bruce when you need him? Where's Bob? Where, for heaven's sake, is Neil Finn?
Nary a peep.
You could be forgiven for thinking nobody in the world of contemporary music actually is on board with Young's protest against Joe Rogan, the star podcaster Young says "disseminates harmful information" about the coronavirus and vaccines.
Then again - and I mean this in the nicest possible way - Neil Young has always been a bit useless when it comes to rousing the troops.
On a good night, with his band playing as commandingly as it did on the night I once saw them many years ago in Wellington, he can make you feel like you're lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in your eyes. But issuing clarion calls to political arms has never been his strong suit.
For now at least, the last of the great protesters has only shuffled the deck in one intriguing respect. In a world in which we are always hearing about this or that artist getting cancelled, the lanky superstar has gone one better and cancelled himself.
Mind you, Young has always been a little back-to-front in his public positioning and bumpy turns of phrase. After an impressively solid apprenticeship with the group Buffalo Springfield, he turned in a bunch of insanely gorgeous solo albums whose appeal was precisely that you didn't know what on earth he was singing about in that shaky voice of his.
Harvest, After the Goldrush and the bucolic Comes A Time are exquisitely oddball works. What most of the songs are about is anybody's guess.
Another of his celebrated albums, Tonight's the Night, was cut from the same crazy cloth: a bunch of toxically out-of-key dirges brutally cranked out in the wake of afternoons spent "getting high, drinking tequila and playing pool", as Young put it to Rolling Stone at the time. It's probably his best work.
But who wants to listen to protest anyway? There are all kinds of perils in putting politics to music, not least the passage of time. Even the best stuff becomes horribly dated in fairly short order. Let alone the rest.
Nearly a half-century ago, for instance, the raspy-voiced Barry McGuire scored a massive (and solitary) worldwide hit for himself with Eve of Destruction - actually written in 1964 by the teenaged PF Sloan - prophesying the imminent end of life as we knew it. The song namechecks Vietnam, the moon landing, the eastern world, floating bodies, civil rights marches, the process of coagulation and much else besides.
Depending on your point of view, Eve of Destruction either stands as the most exciting thing since the invention of the electric toothpick or an utterly puerile tumble of non-sequiturs, the likes of which a listening world would thankfully never bear witness to again until Billy Joel put pen to paper and scratched out We Didn't Start the Fire.
Seen from the retrospect of 57 years, though, the main point here is that the anticipated "destruction" never ended up taking place. The world is still with us, more or less, as indeed is the whiskery Barry McGuire whom I met and interviewed some few years ago while he was living for a while north of Auckland - and who smiled a little sheepishly when this point was put to him.
I'm not sure Neil Young has ever done terribly much better, and yes, that includes the warbling Ohio, penned in the wake of four students getting shot at Kent State University and recorded with the aforementioned Messrs Crosby, Stills and Nash, and instantly recognisable still for its refrain: "This summer I heard the drummin' / Four dead in Ohio".
Oh well, they're all gone now, as indeed Neil Young has gone from Spotify too. As have, reportedly, more than 100 of Joe Rogan's previous podcasts, which I suppose Young can count as a victory. But it's a victory he has largely pulled off on his own. Rust never sleeps indeed.
* David Cohen is a Wellington writer.
