‘This Note’s For You’: when Neil Young took shots at rock “sellouts”
Neil Young has always been resistant to the encroachment of the commercialisation of music. He sees music as it ought to be seen: as an expression of the human soul, and anytime big corporations have taken that away from the art form, Young was often the first to speak up.
In Young’s song ‘This Note’s For You’, the folk legend takes aim at the “sellouts” that had started to dominate the rock charts throughout the 1980s and the preceding decades. In particular, Young was concerned with both the MTV era of rock musicians and the onslaught of advertisements that saturated the airwaves of television and radio.
In fact, the song’s title is a referential play on the words of Budweiser’s iconic advertisement ‘This Bud’s For You’. Young references Budweiser directly within the songs, as well as Miller beer, Pepsi and Coke. The lyric “I got the real thing, baby’ notes Coke’s slogan, “It’s the Real Thing”. Evidently, Young feels that his stance on advertisement and his music is the real deal compared to bowing down to the big corporations.
The procession of Young’s targets within the track didn’t end there, though. He also took shots at the fictional spokesdog for Bud Light. The song contains the line, “Ain’t singing for Spuds” when Spuds was Bud’s bull terrier mascot who was used in the beer company’s campaigns throughout the 1980s.
The video for the track also parodied a number of well-known ad campaigns in America. The video opens by taking the piss out of Eric Clapton, who had performed in an ad for Michelob. In addition to this, Young also took aim at Michael Jackson, who frequently placed Pepsi cans in his music videos.
Jackson shows up in the video (impersonated by an actor) when Young sings the line “Ain’t singing for Pepsi”, and later in the video, the fake Jackson’s hair catches on fire, as it had done for the real Jackson when he shot an advert for Pepsi in 1984, so perhaps the line could have been “Ain’t singe-ing for Pepsi.” Whitney Houston also gets a pretend cameo as she had “sung for Coke” previously.
Young was adamant about never letting his music be littered with product placement, so the attack on his contemporaries is even more understandable. Perhaps the genius behind the song and its video comes at the end when Young turns his beer around to reveal the slogan “Sponsored by Nobody”.
Check out the video for ‘This Note’s For You’ below.
