Which president is Neil Young’s song ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ about?

Between 2015 and 2020, Donald Trump repeatedly played Neil Young‘s single ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ at his rallies, much to the musician’s chagrin. Trump apparently didn’t see the irony of using this song to promote his own presidential campaigns, given what – and who – the song was written about.

As Young himself pointed out in an interview with the Guardian, there was nothing he could do to stop Trump from appropriating the song as his campaign theme if he’d taken the appropriate licensing measures. But that didn’t mean Trump had his blessing to play it. In 2020, the artist reacted angrily on Twitter when he saw the Trump campaign using it again and sued him for copyright infringement.

‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ is a powerful indictment of homelessness, drug addiction and child poverty in the United States, a country which is by many measures the richest in the world. The song also lampoons the country’s credentials for spreading peace and goodwill, as Young scoffs, “We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand.” And with one final swing, he lands a blow on the fossil fuel and automotive industries for endangering the planet simply so they can have “fuel to burn” and “roads to drive”.

It’s easy to see why Trump felt this hard-hitting, All-American rock song might be a fitting soundtrack to his run for the presidency. So many of the issues it addresses, from US involvement in wars around the world to the opiate epidemic, climate change and social inequality, are even more relevant to the American voter today than they were when the song was written back in 1989. What he didn’t seem to understand was that Young was aiming the song at people like him.

Who exactly was it aimed at, though?

To be more specific, at a President of the United States who’d stood on a Republican ticket, spouting empty demagoguery from the soapbox. The lyrics include the phrase “a thousand points of light”, which directly references a quote from George H. W. Bush during his run to the Oval Office in 1988. And the “kinder, gentler” line sarcastically mocks Bush’s promise to Americans that their nation will come to embody these two adjectives more with him as president.

Young wrote the song on the eve of the Gulf War, during a period when the US government engaged in a proxy war with the Iranian regime. Trump would do well to research this part of the song’s history.

Even the title ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ is semi-satirical, born out of the response from Young’s guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro to news that they wouldn’t be allowed to tour the Soviet Union. Young himself seems ambivalent about the “free world” the United States is supposed to stand for. When biographer Dean Kuipers asked him whether the expression was meant to be critical or affirmative, he replied, “Well, it’s kinda both, you know. That’s the picture I saw.”

More than anything, the song was written to make people question the propaganda they’re fed by establishment politicians in the United States. “People can sing it like an anthem,” Young acknowledged, “and yet, if you listen to the words, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ You know?” Perhaps his lyrics inadvertently made a few of the Trump supporters singing along to them stop and think back in 2016 and 2020.

Either way, Young certainly didn’t write ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ for people like Bush and Trump to use. He wrote it to sing at them.

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