He learned it by watching you, Neil
Also: censorship news from a school board in Tennessee, and from movie studios releasing films in China.
Neil Young told Spotify to choose between his music or Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the streaming service made its decision:
Spotify will remove singer-songwriter Neil Young‘s songs from the platform after he objected to being featured on the same platform as podcaster Joe Rogan, who has spread dubious claims about the coronavirus.
In a statement on Wednesday, Spotify said it regretted Young’s decision to request the removal of his music “but hope to welcome him back soon”.
“I realised I could not continue to support Spotify’s life-threatening misinformation to the music-loving people,” said Young.
On Monday, he had publicly asked his management and the streaming company to remove his music from the platform, where he has more than six million monthly listeners.
The 76-year-old musician said many of Spotify’s listeners are hearing misleading information about COVID-19, adding some listeners are young and “impressionable and easy to swing to the wrong side of the truth”.
I guess it’s back to the PONO music store for Young’s music, then.
Seriously, the PONO high-resolution music player debacle is the kind of thing I love about Neil Young. Even when the man has a questionable idea, he doesn’t commit to it half-assedly.
His music (the older stuff, at least; I haven’t listened to a Neil Young album in full since Silver & Gold) is iconic, of course. Young could become a flat earther and I’d still cut him some slack because of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. And he’s right about vaccines, even if he’s pushing us unnervingly close to a world in which even music streaming services are divided between right-ish and left-ish.
The thing is, as with many people who wield the phrase “trust the science” as a cudgel, Young has his own history of questionable conspiracy-mongering about technology:
Neil Young is a perennially pissed-off legend of rock, a toe-tapping lyricist who has used his songs to protest a lot of alleged evil over the years. He’s often dead right, and way out in front, as he was when he started singing about spying in 2006 -- years before NSA leaker Edward Snowden turned surveillance into a cause.
But Young’s latest cause is a sham.
In the past decade, the agrochemical giant Monsanto has become one of the biggest presumed villains in business. Critics blame the company for the rise of genetically modified food, and a related wave of toxic crop runoff and even farmer suicides.
Young joined the fight this summer with a new album, “The Monsanto Years,” and a short film, “Seeding Fear.” They are critical flops and intellectual failures, a case of good music, solid science and one man’s conscience running in opposite directions.
[…]
It’s no surprise that Young’s fight would be a popular one. Most people support labeling GMO foods, because most people think GMOs are actively “unsafe,” according to a pair of recent polls from The New York Times and Pew Research Center.
What all of this reflects is the fact that most Americans are afraid of GMOs. They seem to feel like altering food in a lab is a cosmic power, a tool as miraculous as it is unnerving. But here’s a simple, unmusical truth about GMOs: there is no good evidence – none, zero, zilch – that they are dangerous.
There have been thousands of studies of these foods, none turning up a clear and present danger. Virtually every mainstream science organization is satisfied: The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, and the FDA. All have concluded that GMOs are safe to eat.
But Young’s music and movie play on these fears nonetheless. The lyrics imply that Monsanto’s pesticides are poisoning crops, fouling the health of farmers, and even contributing to cases of autism. In the title track Young sings, "Family seeds they used to save were gifts from God, not Monsanto, Monsanto / Their own child grows ill near the poisoned crops / While they work on, they can't find an easy way to stop, Monsanto, Monsanto."
Again and again on Young's album -- dubbed "lazy" by the Los Angeles Times and "as though he simply cranked up the Current Events Rhyming Couplet Generator" by NPR -- Young returns to GMOs and Monsanto. "Don't say pesticides are causing autistic children / People want to hear about love," he sings on one song. "Yeah, I want a cup of coffee but I don't want a GMO / I like to start my day off without helping Monsanto," he adds in another.
There are legitimate questions about Monsanto’s business practices, but this is veering uncomfortably close to Robert Kennedy, Jr. territory.
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