“Neil Young Offers Greenlanders Free Access to His Archives.” This was the headline on the BBC news website on Wednesday of last week. What have the people of Greenland done to deserve this? I am a huge fan of Neil Young, but even I’ll accept that his monumental back catalogue offers some outliers that the casual Greenland consumer might struggle with.
What will the Inuk-heritage kayak champion Maligiaq Johnsen Padilla, for example, make of the punitive 35-minute feedback collage of 1991’s Arc, the vocoder-driven electro-disco of 1983’s Trans, or the recidivist rockabilly of Everybody’s Rockin’, released later the same year, the latter pair of records seeing Young’s own label sue him for producing “deliberately uncommercial and unrepresentative work”? Rapidly retreating glaciers, threats from foreign powers and now, on top of that, a puzzling gift of the doo-wop pastiche Betty Lou’s Got a New Pair of Shoes. Is there no end to the suffering of Greenland?
“Neil Young Offers Greenlanders Free Access to His Archives.” Because I am a Neil Young bore, he often comes up in conversation at family events. But my sister, who has never heard of him, always gets him confused with 70s pub rocker turned 80s pop star Paul Young. The headline would seem even stranger, presumably, if you think the Greenlanders have been gifted Paul Young’s awkward cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, the Pino-Palladino’s-slithery-tapeworm-fretless-bass-augmented Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home), or the 1978 Streetband novelty hit Toast, which celebrates the joys of the titular warmed bread, a food which may yet seem exotic in the lands of seal blubber, puffin eggs and seagull soup.
“Neil Young Offers Greenlanders Free Access to his Archives.” Even six months ago, we would have struggled to imagine what this headline could possibly mean. But in 2026 we merely assume any apparently insane news pronouncement probably has something to do with the adjudicated sex offender and Village People fan Donald Trump, whose increasingly deranged presence in the world turns every geopolitical pussy it grabs into a phantasmagoria of brain-bleeding necro-surrealism, at once both terrifying and ludicrous, like Fred West in a bee costume.
Luckily the Guardian headline on the same story made things clearer: “Neil Young gifts Greenland free access to his music and withdraws it from Amazon over Trump.” The BBC could have offered that same nutshell clarity but are perhaps scared of offending Trump by saying true things. Basically, Neil Young, a capricious trickster archetype, can do what he wants, including inflicting peak-era art-noise Sonic Youth as an opening act on 1991 audiences expecting southern rock, and annoying the kind of stadium tech crews who like strippers to jump out of birthday cakes.
“I hope my music … will ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government,” Young wrote to the people of Greenland. Ease their unwarranted stress? Has he listened to the live version of Love and Only Love on Weld lately? It’s superb, but I did recently use it to unblock a stubborn toilet after a misguided Saturday night alone attempting a homemade lamb phall.
And as for Amazon? “Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, a billionaire backer of the president,” Young explained. “The president’s international policies and his support of ICE make it impossible for me to ignore his actions. If you feel as I do, I strongly recommend that you do not use Amazon.” And this is the point at which Neil Young’s personal politics provide a window into understanding the world.
In 2026 we merely assume any apparently insane news pronouncement probably has something to do with adjudicated sex offender and Village People fan Donald Trump
Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, funded a puff-piece documentary on Melania Trump to the tune of $75m at the same time as stripping the once-crusading Washington Post, which he now owns, of hundreds of employees, decimating the international coverage of an institution he has pledged will now focus instead on the twin Trumpian pillars of “personal liberties and free markets”, and losing a Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist or two along the way.
Here at home we see the swing of the wrecking ball of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but coverage of his contacts is selective, and skewed by political bias. Epstein is still moving fast and breaking things from beyond the grave, like a paedophile ghost, or a paedapparition, as he would be called by a ghost expert like Derek Acorah.
Social distance from a convicted paedophile is measured by experts in units of Bags of Sweets, or Bags o’ Sweeties as they were known in the imperial measurement era. Peter Mandelson has rightly lost his job, and whatever rotted underpant of a reputation he still had, because of his proximity to Epstein, being but one Bag o’ Sweeties distant. Keir Starmer, two Bags o’ Sweeties away by proxy because of his proximity to Peter “One Bag o’ Sweeties” Mandelson, may yet also go.
Among those calling for Starmer’s head is Nigel Farage. But Farage has close ties to his white supremacist mentor Steve Bannon, who was one Bag o’ Sweeties removed from Jeffrey Epstein, advising him on reputational rehabilitation and seeking a dark-money funding strategy to float his and Farage’s far-right “Movement” in Europe. This, I am afraid, places Farage a mere two Bags o’ Sweeties from Paedophile Island, which, to put it in terms even Reform voters might understand, was a sort of Rotherham minicab-office back room for super-rich white men.
Farage’s best friend, and the bravest man he has ever met, Donald Trump, was once so few Bags o’ Sweeties away from Epstein there were no sweets left in any of the bags, because he had eaten them all. But I suppose we won’t be reading much about this in the Washington Post any time soon, whose Amazonian owner just funded a Trump hagiography. Still, at least we won’t be short of updates on the twin pillars of personal liberties and free markets.
The news stories you consume, and the platforms you access them from, are increasingly controlled by technocrat Trump loyalists, and algorithmically skewed to the right to foment hatred and sow confusion to the benefit of their billionaire backers. You’d do better getting all your news from Neil Young press releases. But don’t give up hope. Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World. Throw Your Hatred Down. And remember the victims.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, and is currently playing at London’s Alexandra Palace