OLD AND BUSTED: “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.”
The New Hotness? Neil Young Demands Spotify Remove His Music Over ‘False Information About Vaccines.’ “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young,” Neil Young wrote in a letter to his manager and label. “Not both.”
But what if this is Neil Young’s way of saving his fans from themselves? Neil Young hates what the internet has done to music.
Spotify may not be literally damaging our brains, but he’s not entirely wrong, either.
There’s an epic interview slash feature in the New York Times with music legend Neil Young. The notoriously particular audio purist explains why he believes the internet is killing music through poor quality streaming, and how it’s harming our brains.
Young appears not only to believe that the quality of the music is poor, which few would argue in comparison to vinyl. He also believes it’s literally harming our minds.
Neil Young, described here as “crankier than a hermit being stung by bees,” loathes Spotify, Facebook, Apple, and Steve Jobs, who it must be noted, is dead.
“He hates what digital technology is doing to music,” most of all, writes David Samuels in today’s NYT.
“It’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t want to write music anymore.”
This is merely an update to Young’s 1980s response to another then-emerging digital technology:
“‘Everything recorded between 1981 and say, 2010 will be known as the dark ages of recorded sound,” Young began. On the surface, his distaste for the CD seems a little over-dramatic, but he had a number of important reasons for disliking the format. The compact disc took over from the cassette tape in the early 1980s and was released in tandem with stereo players fitted with the newly-invented programming button, allowing the listener to reorganise album tracklists to suit their own tastes, essentially giving the middle finger to the intentions of artists such as Young, who believed so strongly in the sanctity of their artistic vision.
But for Young, the CD heralded something much worse – the dominance of digital sound. “It’s almost like torture,” he argued. “Digital makes you think that you’re hearing it better than you heard it before [but] you’re hearing a facsimile of it, you’re only hearing the surface of it,” he continued. He’s got a point. Digital sound – unlike analogue formats like cassette and vinyl, which are physically imprinted with recorded sound waves – are often regarded as mere representations of recorded sound.
Spotify should call Young’s bluff with a statement that “Based on Mr. Young’s earlier comments about Spotify and other digital media, while we hate to see him go, we believe that it’s in the mutual best interests of Mr. Young, his fans and Spotify, that we, reluctantly, must let him go.”
UPDATE: Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it. Ed Morrissey writes that Young has since pulled his letter. “ Young has now given Rogan even greater cachet as someone fighting off cancel culture and muzzling by the establishment. It’s as self-defeating as it is oppressive, and as it should be offensive to others who work in the free-speech environment … like aging protest singers. Perhaps Young pulled down the letter after rethinking that context. Or perhaps he and his business managers considered the money context, a point to which we must return. Spotify isn’t going to eat $100 million dollars just so senior citizens can still access ‘Heart of Gold.’ That kind of ultimatum is ludicrous on its own, but especially so given the business relationship between Spotify and Rogan. When someone declares, ‘It’s either him or me,’ it’s an act of arrogance at best — and in this case, ignorance about Young’s cultural relevancy in this moment. If we didn’t know any better, it would look like a cynical attempt to boost his relevancy.”
Via a platform that as recently as 2019, Young professed to loathe, at least according to his New York Times interviewer.
(Updated and bumped.)
