By the standards of 1987 maybe Clapton did sell out, but if he hadn’t Michelob simply would have found somebody else, and listeners wouldn’t have gotten a new version of “After Midnight” that I prefer to the original.
Thirty-odd years later, in the darkest days of Covid coercion, most celebrities were lining up to parrot authoritarian talking points. Even as people were getting vilified and censored and canceled for questioning mandates and lockdowns, Eric Clapton courageously put his ass on the line to become an outspoken critic of pandemic policy, using his fame and platform at significant cost to give voice to millions of people who had been silenced. When it mattered most, he chose human rights over his career.
And what did Neil Young do? The supposed conscience of the counterculture tried to strongarm Spotify into canceling Joe Rogan for spreading “disinformation” about vaccines, some of which eventually became widely acknowledged. Debate was dangerous, in Young’s view—the little people needed to be obedient to their technocratic betters. In terms of betraying what rock ‘n’ roll and the sixties, man were supposed to represent, he became one of the biggest sell-outs in music history.
I don’t look to musicians as moral exemplars, and certainly both Clapton and Young have checkered pasts. I still love Neil Young’s music, I can separate the art from the man, but I’ll never hear him in quite the same way again.
As Jim Treacher wrote last year, “Welcome to the PMRC, Neil Young.”