Does your conscience bother you?
Via the Times, last Wednesday:
“Spotify said on Wednesday that it had begun removing [Neil Young’s] music from the streaming service, two days after he briefly posted a public letter calling on Spotify to choose between him and Joe Rogan, the star podcast host who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.”
Neil Young has always been a scold. It’s who he is. It’s fine, but in 2022 he’s read the tea leaves incorrectly. It’s understandable. With corporations going “woke,” he believes he holds a moral high ground, this time with company teeth.
By “The People” in the title of this post, I’m referring to Spotify, the streaming service that has a multimillion dollar contract with podcaster Joe Rogan, and also I’m referring to all the people who love Rogan’s podcast. I’m not a listener, but he is enormously popular, a comedian who is practically a figurehead of today’s anti-Great Awokening, in that he keeps and open mind and sometimes features guests who aren’t “woke,” including vaccine skeptics.
(Also, he moved his whole operation out of California to Texas last year, a move plenty of people consider pointedly un-woke.)
Neil Young will not stand for it! Joe Rogan is a heretic! So last week Young told Spotify: It’s me or him!
As of this writing, Neil Young’s music is no longer available on Spotify. On that platform, his regular listeners are shit outta luck. A self own, we call this.
It’s certainly not censorship for one artist to boycott another artist’s work, and for that artist to call on his followers to do so as well. That’s a healthy First Amendment flex right there. People vote with their feet all the time. (Note: Young is a Canadian.) Young telling Spotify to pick either him or Rogan is fine, too, legally, though the scoldiness of it is something anyone should be wary of—and weary of—by now: we’ve experienced some real whiplash these past two years as now the most puritanical voices in our culture are coming from the left, rather than the right.
Let’s back up.
Does your conscience bother you?
Lynyrd Skynyrd asks this famous question in its (second-) most famous song, Sweet Home Alabama, from 1974, which also contains these lines, about Neil Young:
Big wheels keep on turnin'
Carry me home to see my kin
Singin' songs about the south-land
I miss Alabamy once again and I think it's a sin, yes
Well I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well I heard ol' Neil put her down
Well I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow.
They miss home, and they’ve been told (by Young, and people like Young) that it’s a sin to do so. The song is a direct riposte to Young’s also-famous song Southern Man, in which a self-righteous Young characterizes the entire Southern United States as hopelessly racist and horrible. He’s been at this for 40 years.
Sweet Home Alabama can’t help it that it’s one of the most satisfying songs on earth to listen to while driving. It is a tremendous rock-and-roll anthem from a band with an unparalleled rhythm section, martyred forever by a 1977 plane crash that killed half the band. Lynyrd Skynyrd made music for people like them, just as Neil Young makes music for people like himself. This is how art can work, or at least used to. And back-and-forth conflicts between artists can lead to better art. We have Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s because great musicians wanted to top each other.
I like a lot of Young’s music, and over the years I’ve listened to him far more than I have Lynyrd Skynyrd; I’ve paid to see him live, and his songs After the Goldrush, Harvest Moon, The Needle and the Damage Done, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and Helpless have been in my song mixes since I’ve been making them. As of today, I can listen to these songs, these eternal gems, by either dipping into my own library, or pulling them up on Youtube. You can, too. Thus, in his self-own, Young has not self-censored.
And if Spotify had severed ties with Joe Rogan, Rogan would have just taken his money and massive audience and jumped to another service. It’s hard to silence anyone these days, though it’s not for progressives’ lack of effort.
So, I ask: does your conscience bother you?
Does it bug you that you’re from Texas, have an accent, have a family lousy with Republicans? Are you ashamed of where you’re from? Are you ashamed of your dirt-poor ancestors, who arrived here before the Civil War? If you’re Gen X, from the south, and college-educated, I would guess that at one point or another in your life you felt shame about these things, or about being homesick for your home. Neil Young himself told us we’re nothing but trash. So did the people in the places we moved to for work: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London.
This shaming is in the same category as the internalized shame that millions of progressive Americans have turned into performative hand-wringing over the state of everything. We bow our heads in shame. Let’s let the scolds tell us who we are. Let’s all feel terrible about who we are, all the time, forever more.
Buying into it is self-flagellating bullshit. This is the bullshit that’s gotten us here, where no one talks to each other anymore, no one trusts each other. It is enormously corrosive to the soul, and to any sense of shared community or reality. The sanctimony of progressives is what got Trump elected in 2016, and it will get DeSantis elected in 2024. Puritanical voices insist half the population is categorically sinful for existing—and now lumped in with the sinners are all the independents, centrists, undecideds, social liberals who are fiscally conservative, and classic liberals—and it’s a losing battle. They will turn on the progressive agenda by voting with their feet.
American geographical sanctimony has run its course; it’s a failed project. When I read a piece in The New York Times about how Texas is a popular place to move to, and the commenters weigh in with relentless trashing of my home, I eat it up, and happily; I wallow in smug resentment. Over and over, the comments: “I would not step foot in Texas, let alone live there.” How handy. Because if this is your line, we don’t want you here.
Where did these people get the idea that Texans and any liberal or progressive mindset are diametrically opposed? Every close friend I have in this state voted for Clinton, for Biden—for Sanders or Warren in primaries. That includes me.
Progressives everywhere speak in absolutes at this point, and their prime targets for shaming are liberals who believe in free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and due process. They don’t even bother with Ted Cruz anymore. In the circular firing squad of identity politics, they know us liberals feel accountable and will respond with care, so we get hammered by them. Progressives, let me remind you: you don’t know us, you don’t know our lives, you don’t know this place, Texas. This is where we live, love, raise kids, make art, get shit done, and vote for universal healthcare, higher minimum wage, and prison reform. Just like you.
(Wildly disproportionate pendulum swings, from both sides, are happening daily. Constant payback. Book bans? Right-wingers want to ban books by Toni Morrison and Art Spiegelman now. They will keep genius literature written by fellow Americans out of schools. Did progressives not see this coming?)
God knows Texas isn’t perfect, its history is bloody, that the South’s legacy is a minefield of fucked-up. God also knows that shaming people for where they are from, for what they love, for things they aren’t responsible for, is a non-starter, unless you already wield the power of Chairman Mao.
I know a lot of good people who are still in this place of shaming self-hate. I know more who are done with it, and feel utterly betrayed by the progressive agenda. When a bunch of activists tried to get Dave Chappelle booted from Netflix last October, we wondered where all these new puritans were coming from—they really want to abolish Chappelle; they want him dead—and we wondered if they know how the First Amendment works, and how fundamental it is to democracy. To the existence of art itself. (To jokes. We like jokes.)
But I mean, with elder scolds like Neil Young still making these moves, are we surprised? I feel protective of Rogan now, the honorary Texan. He’s not always right, but at least he’s not a scold. He doesn’t tell me I should hate myself, my family, my home.
Chappelle is still on Netflix. Rogan is still on Spotify. That’s how money works. People really like their work and pay for it. Corporations aren’t woke; they are in it to make money by offering people what they want. They will play woke when it’s a money maker, and ignore the new (and old) puritans of wokeness when it makes financial sense.
Whatever your politics: you still can listen to Neil Young anyway, just not on Spotify, and you can get yourself to a gender clinic even with Chappelle alive and well. Welcome to 2022. The rightwing backlash is upon us. It will be vicious. They have all the guns.
Yet many Democrats who hate Trump feel suffocated by their own party now, for doing this—for telling the majority of us that we’re irredeemable trash for living in the wrong kinds of places, for liking jokes, for liking comedians, for liking podcasts. For liking our home, for living our lives, and loving the people we love, and loving the art we love.
Anger is an energy. Another song lyric for another day.
Here’s a clever Marshall Mathers and Mekhi Phifer, in the trailer park, taking out the trash. Enjoy.
People were fussing on Facebook about, what music platform can I switch to? Getting off Spotify. I’m thinking… But you’re asking on FB - the hub of misinformation dissemination.
And of course as you know, I’m done shaming myself for being from/living in Big D, but spent years thinking that way
So glad to find you back in print…I’m a born and raised TXN who spent 6 years in SF and 25 in NYC and recently moved back to ATX…this article speaks volumes to me…and I too am a long time liberal who reads the NYT comments on moving to TX…thank you for giving more eloquent voice to my feeling…