Any parent can tell you why you shouldn’t indulge toddlers. Neil Young — memorably described by my twentysomething colleague Alexandra DeSanctis Marr as someone “I can’t remember having heard of” until he announced he didn’t like sharing the same electronic continent as Joe Rogan — is a toddler. He has the same grasp of reality as a toddler and, as of this winter, the same expectation that his demands will result in immediate actions. Indulge a temper tantrum, expect another. Young is 76 and hasn’t been in the national conversation in 30 years. He’s having the time of his life. People under the age of “voted for George McGovern” are actually paying attention to him!
Now Young is moving on to telling people not to use banks. “Stop supporting banks contributing to the the [sic] mass fossil fuel destruction of earth,” says the crusty Canuck rocker on his website, calling on people to pull their savings from JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, four of the largest banks in North America. “Please join me and move the power of your money away from the damage causers or you will unintentionally be one of them,” Young says.
Why stop there? Surely just about every bank is, by Young’s reckoning, involved in fossil fuels in one way or another, as are all of the fossil-fuel companies and all of the companies that use fossil fuels, which is to say, just about every company. Young might want to take a peek at, for instance, how vinyl records and CDs are made: both from petroleum. As with many other boycotters, the only logical endpoint here for Young to boycott himself.
Although Young’s stick-your-money-in-your-mattress screed is ridiculous, it’s no more ridiculous than his spat with Spotify. Which is why Spotify should have simply denied those who want to change it into an ideological safe space, and embraced the power of “no.”
When broad-based platforms, such as Spotify, that were previously intended to serve a very wide spectrum of demand begin to frantically reverse gear and start to issue suggestions that it wouldn’t be “inclusive” or “diverse” or “safe” if it continued to host anything someone might find objectionable, they effectively submit to a heckler’s veto that simply invigorates the mob and invites more demands. Spotify should have ignored Young while it had the chance. His latest demand is so nonsensical that I expect it won’t even get much publicity, much less prove effective. The more ridiculous Young looks, the worse Spotify looks for indulging his views.