Do we like Neil Young?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decades of real activism and charity, held back by ugly 1980s remarks about gay men and AIDS that we found no apology for.
Neil Young is the Canadian-born rock lifer who co-founded Farm Aid in 1985 with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, and he has spent the decades since being a stubborn thorn in the side of whoever is in power. Farm Aid is now the longest-running benefit concert series in America, and Nelson once called him “stubborn, passionate, and persistent”. That's the bloke in a nutshell.
The fresh stoush is a legal one. Young's lawyers allege that Trump's fundraising committee played Rockin' in the Free World at a 12 October rally in Youngstown, Ohio, without a licence or his say-so, and that Trump knew permission was needed. He's seeking US$10 million, and none of it has been tested in court. He sued over the same song in 2020 and dropped that case, so this is round two.
On the harm test, here's the ugly bit. In a 1985 Melody Maker interview, Young made crude remarks about gay men handling food and called AIDS “worse than the Killer Bees”. Queerty's report found no apology, though it notes he later wrote Philadelphia for the AIDS film and was reportedly going to donate the proceeds. That's a long time ago, but a mate who's LGBTQ+ would want to know. Nothing about trans people, women or migrants turned up in our searches, and that is the whole list.
The other mark is the Spotify saga. In January 2022 Young demanded Spotify drop either his music or Joe Rogan's podcast, citing vaccine misinformation, and the music came down. He returned in 2024, saying Apple and Amazon were now carrying the same podcast, so his protest no longer singled out Spotify. You can read that as principled or as a protest that fizzled, and the vaccine fight itself is a public-health call most readers will side with him on.
The good stuff is long and mostly cost him something. He pulled his music from Amazon, saying it would never return while Bezos owns it, and admitted it hurts him financially in the short term. He gave Greenland's residents a free subscription to his catalogue after Trump's threats against the territory. He walked away from X in 2023 over Musk's amplification of antisemitic content. In May he turned up unannounced in Vancouver for a benefit honouring environmentalist David Suzuki.
MusiCares named him its 2010 Person of the Year for his artistic work and philanthropy, and the recent touring has been with his band The Chrome Hearts. We found no harmful company in his recent work. He did cancel all his 2026 touring, saying he was taking a break from Europe, so this is a man still picking his fights rather than slowing down.