Spotify Don’t Need Neil Young Around Anyhow

CLAY: Neil Young. Not a big fan of Spotify, by the way. Did you see this story? Has insisted that his music be removed from Spotify as long as Joe Rogan’s podcast is up. If you were Spotify’s CEO, what would your response be to Neil Young, Buck?

BUCK: This is a pretty funny one. It’s always a bad thing in any media entertainment business to wildly publicly overestimate your value. They paid a hundred million dollars for Joe Rogan at Spotify. I’m pretty sure they could live without the Neil Young catalog. I’m just gonna say this. No disrespect to Neil Young fans out there.

CLAY: You’re gonna be disrespectful to Neil Young fans, by the way. When you say no disrespect, immediately this is going to be disrespectful.

BUCK: I do like to pick fights with Bruce Springsteen fans ’cause we have a lot of listeners in New Jersey, and I love my New Jersey brothers and sisters, but I like to pick fights with them over Springsteen. But I sit here, I can’t even… I don’t even know enough about Neil Young’s catalog to make fun of him. I think I know more about Kenny G’s catalog of songs than Neil Young at this point.

CLAY: You know what’s funny — and I’m not a music guy, right, like, in terms of being super knowledgeable. But any first thought of Neil Young is isn’t Sweet Home Alabama, don’t they say, “I hope Neil Young will remember…”? And I don’t even think that was the same Neil Young. I think that was like the governor of Alabama at the time.

BUCK: That would be sad, like, if there was a great — ’cause Sweet Home Alabama is one of the great all time American rock songs. Imagine if there was, like, a Clay Travis reference that wasn’t to you. Be like, there’s another —

CLAY: That’s a different Neil Young. I don’t even know that Neil Young sings that I would know.

BUCK: Oh, he’s saying it’s the same. The guys in here… You know, we got the team in here. They say, yes, that it’s the same Neil Young. That makes more sense.

CLAY: Okay. So it is the same Neil Young. Then that’s the only time I even think about Neil Young. So as long as they leave Sweet Home Alabama there, I don’t even care. Neil Young’s most famous part of his musical career may be the shout-out that he gets on the Sweet Home Alabama song.

BUCK: Isn’t it amazing to watch? At a broader level, you have these different — whether it’s musicians, actors, who you think of them, because we grew up and certainly the generation before us, Clay, grew up… Are you technically…? I’m technically a Millennial. What’s up. You’re technically Gen Y?

CLAY: I’m the old… No. I’m the oldest member of Generation X.

BUCK: Oh, Generation X.

CLAY: I think Millennial began in 1980, I think.

BUCK: Yes. That’s right.

CLAY: I was born in 1979. So I missed it by like eight months. So we’re technically members of different generations.

BUCK: Right. But so, the generation that came before both of us, they thought of artists, musicians in particular as counterculture. Think of Jimi Hendrix, revolution, all this stuff.

CLAY: Just Woodstock in general.

BUCK: Yeah. Now they’re all The Man. Even Howard Stern has turned into The Man. I mean, he’s not a musician, but we see what’s going on. They’re supporting the biggest control gap of human beings in the United States in living memory, and they’re a part of the machinery. It’s amazing. Neil Young is The Man.

CLAY: Well, think about this too. College kids today, some of them are demanding that their freedoms be more regulated. For anybody out there who was a Baby Boomer, for anybody who remembers the Vietnam protests, they’re right now are the safest generation of people that has ever existed in the history of the United States, right? If you’re 18 years old and you’re in college right now, hopefully some of you are listening to us, you have never been under less physical danger in the entire history of the United States, right?

Your physical danger is lower. Yet they feel so on overwhelmingly fearful that they are demanding that schools take away their freedoms, Buck. They’re basically protesting to be regulated more. It’s wild to think about. And I hope that at some point there are going to be some of these kids that are brave enough to step back and say, “Wait. It’s not rebellious to be on the side of everyone in positions of power. That’s the opposite of rebellion.”