Neil Young, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s last great curmudgeons, has never been renowned for his warm relationships with American presidents. In the 2000s, he called for impeaching both George W. Bush and Barack Obama on The Colbert Report. In 2020, he sued Donald Trump for using 1989’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” — a bitter attack on George H.W. Bush and post-Reagan American culture — at his campaign rallies. That same year, he branded the president a “disgrace to my country” in an open letter. Now, he’s expressing his disdain for the Donald in musical rather than epistolary form. But classifying his new protest song, “Big Crime,” as music feels like a gross distortion of the word.
Young debuted the song this week at a concert in Chicago and officially released the audio shortly thereafter. He also shared the lyrics on his website, which could forgivably be mistaken for a serial killer’s paranoid blog if discovered by chance:
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