Neil Young’s new protest song is an embarrassing attempt at musical activism.
Neil Young, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s last great curmudgeons, has never been renowned for his warm relationships with American presidents. In the 2000s, he called for impeaching both George W. Bush and Barack Obama on The Colbert Report. In 2020, he sued Donald Trump for using 1989’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” — a bitter attack on George H.W. Bush and post-Reagan American culture — at his campaign rallies. That same year, he branded the president a “disgrace to my country” in an open letter. Now, he’s expressing his disdain for the Donald in musical rather than epistolary form. But classifying his new protest song, “Big Crime,” as music feels like a gross distortion of the word.
Young debuted the song this week at a concert in Chicago and officially released the audio shortly thereafter. He also shared the lyrics on his website, which could forgivably be mistaken for a serial killer’s paranoid blog if discovered by chance:
No more great again
No – no more great again
There’s a big crime in DC at THE White House
There’s a big crime in DC at THE White House
No more money to the fascists
the billionaire fascists
TIME TO BLACKOUT THE SYSTEM
Somehow, I doubt such verse will attract the attention of the Nobel Committee for Literature.
In his prime, Young had a gift for distilling raw, universal emotions into delicate phrases. Songs such as “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” explored themes of loneliness and longing with a tender touch and penetrating eye. Even his more socially conscious compositions — “Ohio,” “The Needle and the Damage Done” — possessed a certain degree of poetic grace.
“Big Crime,” meanwhile, has all the grace of a homeless man screaming about government conspiracies on a street corner. With such insightful observations as “Got to get the fascists out / got to Clean the white house out,” the song would have been more effective if it were scribbled on a picket sign at a freshman college protest. The plodding musical arrangement — which evokes hard rock as played by an uninterested computer program — only underscores its risible bluntness.
Certainly, not all protest songs need to be as richly metaphorical as “Strange Fruit,” but a truly powerful social rallying cry should be set to some kind of intense or otherwise engaging musical accompaniment. Protest anthems of generations past — from “What’s Going On,” to “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” to “Fight the Power” — balanced musical brio with lyrics that, though direct, were more sophisticated or uniquely pointed than Young’s collection of discarded Jacobin headlines.
This isn’t the first time Young’s taken a president to task in ham-handedly forthright fashion. In 2006, he dedicated an entire album, Living with War, to rebuking the Bush administration and its actions in Iraq. One track, the cryptically titled “Let’s Impeach the President,” opens with the line, “Let’s impeach the president for lyin’ / And misleading our country into war.” The album was released to a mostly positive reception, and media outlets have greeted “Big Crime” as a “blistering” song that “absolutely scorches” Trump.
Really, though, the only thing “Big Crime” absolutely scorches is the notion that rock music has any relevance left as a countercultural force. Consequential protest songs still exist, but they are primarily produced by rappers, and even then with far less frequency on a major level than in years past. They certainly aren’t being recorded by septuagenarian ex-hippies. The cantankerous guitar-wielders of Young’s era may still sell out concerts, but their attempts to influence the political conversation are pitiable. This isn’t simply a left-wing phenomenon, either. In 2020, Van Morrison released “No More Lockdown,” a protest song that targeted Covid-19 restrictions. It was broadly ridiculed, largely because the media opposed its message, but equally because its clumsy lyrical content and plodding arrangement formed something more laughable than edifying.
In the minds of aging rock stars, America’s political culture remains suspended in the eras of Johnson and Nixon. But we no longer live in the late ’60s, and the supercilious view of rock as a uniquely enlightened musical form is antiquated. Figures such as Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen should leave behind their juvenile activism and focus on enjoying their overpriced legacy tours.