A Degraded and Neutered Sound: Spotify, Joe Rogan, and the betrayal of Neil Young

The three-way battle between Neil Young, Joe Rogan, and Spotify has opened up a new front in the war between artistic integrity and corporate reality.

In case you missed it, legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young went nuclear this week on Spotify. Taking to his website, Young issued the music streaming platform with a simple ultimatum.

“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he said.

“They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

The issue at hand was Rogan’s Covid ‘skepticism’, which parsed for barely concealed denialism.

Maybe you are blessedly oblivious not to know Joe Rogan. If so, the TL;DR explanation of The Fear Factor host and UFC commentator is “what would toxic machismo look like if it had a podcast?”

The longer answer is that Rogan has a history of both questioning the accepted science of Covid-19, and of providing a platform to those who think along the same lines. It started in earnest in September, when he posted a video on Instagram to cancel an upcoming live event in Nashville because he had contracted Covid.

But, you know, no problem when you are big, bald, butch JOE ROGAN.

In what could only be described as part hostage video, part escapee from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rogan explained to his Insta followers that Covid was no biggie for one puffy-chested such as he.

“Here we are on Wednesday,” he said, feeling “pretty fuckin’ good.”

I’m no doctor, but I’d go so far as to say his far horizon stare and pallid complexion looked like someone looking the opposite of pretty fuckin’ good. But it wasn’t his denialism that grabbed headlines. It was naming Ivermectin — a drug repeatedly shilled by Donald Trump — as one of the many treatments that he decided to take to treat the virus.

By this stage, Ivermectin, and Trump’s relentless promotion of it, had already been thoroughly debunked as a Covid treatment to the point where the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the greatest statement it had ever — or will ever — tweet

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.

Rogan was derided for the comment. Unfairly, perhaps. It was a throwaway item among a long list of many treatments he and (hopefully) his doctors prescribed, including some with evidenced efficacy. The skepticism/denialism only steamrolled from there.

Most likely, you know people who have contracted and recovered from Covid. Those people likely expressed gratitude for their recovery, and for the medical professionals who urgently, yet methodically, followed an established scientific path back to health.

Joe Rogan is not one of those people.

Having kicked the ass of the virus in his typically testosterone-fuelled way, Rogan would go on to using his inexplicably popular podcast to give voice to Covid denialism over coming months. These included gushing over an infectious diseases researcher who was banned from Twitter after claiming that science had established that vaccines “are not working”, and arguing with another doctor’s claims that the virus impacts young people. With the latter, Rogan insisted “That is not what I’ve read before.”

When confronted by people who are actual experts in their field, Joe Rogan is the kind of guy who ‘does his own research.’

Which is where 76-year-old Neil Young — having contracted Covid himself, and with a long history of speaking truth to power — stepped in with his demands that Spotify severe ties with either Rogan or with Young himself, saying,

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them… Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”

Spotify responded with ‘fuck you, legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young.’

I’m paraphrasing, of course. What Spotify actually said was:

“We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.”

Which is basically the same thing.

The side-taking by Spotify who — and it seems weird to even have to reiterate this — are a MUSIC streaming platform — seems strange. Young is one of the most respected musicians of the modern era. His contribution to the form holds its own against the works of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. Rogan is a social media talking head who seeks out fellow travelers along the way to a weird little world in which talking tough on the internet is the same thing as actual gravitas.

As the battle draws sides, Young has attracted the most crucial allies so far. The most important of these should probably be the World Health Organisation, who called out their thanks to him for “standing up against misinformation and inaccuracies around #COVID19 vaccination.”

But really, the killer opening gambit came from the equally legendary singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell, who demanded the removal of her own works from Spotify in support of her old friend.

As with Young, the move puts Mitchell at risk of losing as much as sixty percent of her audience. As a woman whose cultural zenith was in decades past — and whose magnum opus, 1971’s Blue, is undergoing a renaissance courtesy of its recent fiftieth anniversary — she arguably risks even more.

What happens next?

Speculation is rife in the music press over who, if anyone, will follow the stance of Young and Mitchell in challenging the dominance of the streaming service.

Young has clarified that he supports the concept of corporate freedom to choose, while simultaneously doubling down on criticism of Spotify’s “shitty, degraded and neutered sound.”

#CancelSpotify is trending on Twitter.

Rogan has remained uncharacteristically quiet.

The victor in the fight, he will likely be satisfied with the hits, the links, and the flaccid corporate victory over a septuagenarian. The Joe Rogan Experience has already moved on to other controversies, such as the platforming of incel-God Jordan B. Peterson’s latest bizarre rant on climate change.

In the days ahead, Spotify might be well advised to recall to words of Neil Young’s 1989 hit, Rockin’ In The Free World.

“there’s a warnin’ sign on the road ahead There’s a lot of people sayin’ we’d be better off dead Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them So I try to forget it any way I can.”

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