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For 45 years Neil Young has periodically entered the political fray by writing influential protest songs that shine a light on injustice.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.” To baby boomers this is a familiar lyric from one of the most influential political songs of their youth. “Ohio,” as the song is simply titled, is an elegy for four student protesters who were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in 1970 National Guard at Kent State University in 1970. It is an anti-government rallying cry for a generation of Americans that was penned and sung by a Canadian — Neil Young.
For 45 years Young has been in the business of periodically entering big political debates and writing conscience-ridden anthems aimed primarily at his adopted America. He does so sparingly, when he is truly enraged by injustices he sees around him. Mostly he’s been on the right side of history. Almost always his protest songs have been influential and popular if not major hits.
It was Neil Young who reminded Americans that official racism remained alive and well in the south years after the passage of the Civil Right and Voting Rights Acts. His two brilliant anti-racist tunes of the early 1970s — “Alabama” and “Southern Man” — shone a bright light on racism in the age of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. When Young reminded Alabamans that “your Cadillac has a got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track,” he had more impact with one sentence than many in the civil rights movement had with thousands of words.
Fast forward to 1980s America, a period symbolized by Gordon Gekko, the fictional character in the film Wall Street, who famously summed up his version of the American dream with the phrase “greed is good, greed works.” The Reagan and Bush administrations were in power then and believed America’s less fortunate citizens could be best helped through “trickle-down economics” rather than government programs.
Young was evidently incensed with this thinking and responded with “Rockin’ in the Free World,” a blistering anthem that paints a vivid picture of a decaying, soulless survival of the fittest America. Again, Young summed up the state of affairs with one powerful line — “We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man” — making a mockery of the metaphor George H.W. Bush used to convey the notion that clubs and community organizations offered the road to a “kinder, gentler America.” “Rockin’ in the Free World” reached No. 2 in the U.S. charts, is now considered a classic and still receives regular airplay.
In 1985, amidst a financial crisis among American farmers, Young spearheaded Farm Aid, a benefit concert designed to raise money and awareness for the beleaguered family farmer. As well as producing early legislative changes in Washington to provide better financial support to small farms, Farm Aid became an annual political statement and is now entering its 30th year.
Today Young is outraged again, only this time it’s with his home country. He hates the oilsands. He thinks it’s the world’s greatest environmental disaster and he believes the health of First Nations peoples, who live near the projects, is threatened.
On a recent visit to northern Alberta, Young gave voice to these opinions. The oil industry and their supplicants summarily dismissed his views.
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