Neil Young and Joni Mitchell led the movement of aging and unknown musicians who removed their music from Spotify in protest of podcast superstar Joe Rogan’s staying on the platform.
Spotify has been criticized for failing to censor the Joe Rogan Experience, which critics have accused of spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19.
Young gave Spotify an ultimatum for streaming services to choose either Rogan or himself for a $100 million deal.
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Conflict His 76-year-old position has inspired the 78-year-old “Both Sides, Now” singer and others.
However, Mitchell and Young each have their own controversial histories.
During the height of the AIDS epidemic, Neil Young attacked the gay community, suggesting anyone can catch the disease at the grocery store and using a homophobic slur.
“I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard (when) a [B]lack guy walked by me with a diddybop kind of step, and said in the most wonderful way, ‘Lookin’ good, sister, lookin’ gooood’,” Mitchell explained the inspiration for the costume in a 1988 interview with Q Magazine. “His spirit was infectious, and I thought, I’ll go as him. I bought the makeup, the wig… sleazy hat and a sleazy suit and that night I went to a Halloween party and nobody knew it was me.”
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“You go to a supermarket and you see a ft behind the fin` cash register, you don`t want him to handle your potatoes,” Young said in a 1985 interview with Melody Maker.
Meanwhile, Joni Mitchell has a history of wearing blackface. As BBC reported, Mitchell appeared at a 1976 Halloween party as a “pimplike character” described as a “svelte black man in a zoot suit with matching chapeau, meticulous afro, wide moustache and big, dark shades.”
It turned out Mitchell was dressing as her alter ego “Art Nouveau.”
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And that wasn’t the last time “Art Nouveau” was seen. In fact, “Nouveau” appeared on the cover of her 1977 album “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.”
Mitchell went beyond dressing in blackface, asserting on multiple occasions how much she identifies as being Black, which she alleged began with comments from her dentist, who told her, “‘Oh, you`ve got the worst bite I`ve ever seen. You have teeth like a Negro male.`”
"I don't have the soul of a [W]hite woman," Mitchell told LA Weekly. "I write like a [B]lack poet. I frequently write from a [B]lack perspective."
