Neil Young has never been shy about letting the world know who can, in his opinion, go fuck themselves. In the past, that august list has included everybody from record executives, to any number of former collaborators, to all who dared speak against the power of Pono. But these days, it’s mostly just the one guy who gets his public ire: Neil Young fan Donald Trump, who Young has had no qualms about telling to get fucked.
In the past, that invitation to self-fuckery has often come in the form of telling Trump to stop using his music for campaign events—although, when Trump apparently agreed to do so back in 2016, Young briefly laid off the denunciations. He picked back up again a couple of years later, though, pointing to Trump’s ignorance on climate change as a contributing factor to the wildfires that destroyed Young’s California home in 2018, and also the environment in general, which is one of those things—along with Daryl Hannah, Pearl Jam, and high-definition lossless audio, that Neil Young actually likes. Which all brings us to this weekend, when Young was once again reminded that a human being he personally does not seem to care for keeps trotting out his tunes to introduce speeches espousing ideas that Young himself almost certainly hates, when both “Rockin’ In The Free World” and “Like A Hurricane” were played at a Trump event at Mt. Rushmore yesterday.
In a series of tweets, Young made it clear that he’s stridently not okay with the use of his music by Trump, and that he fully supports the Lakota people, upon whose land Mt. Rushmore was built, and who continue to have serious problems with its use by the U.S. government. (All this, while Trump gave a speech calling for some kind of national garden for all the statues of slavers and war criminals people have been removing from public spaces of late, a sort of National Madame Tussaud’s of Assholes.)
Anyway: There’s no way we can expect any of this to shame Donald Trump, a man who had his shame gland excised some time circa 1964. But it’s still always good when the people who the man ostensibly admires remind him that they all think he should suck shit.