RAMBLE ON: "This Note's for You" by Neil Young

That Michelob looks so goddamn refreshing. Filled up right to the top of the glass, condensation dripping down the side. The venue is a bar that looks like a dive but is upscale enough to attract classy clientele; there’s a lot of neon signs on the wall, and a sharply dressed man and woman are making eyes at each other. They don’t look the type to be drinking Michelob, but maybe the ‘80s were different. The soundtrack is Eric Clapton playing a very ‘80s version of “After Midnight.” Throughout this we’ve seen Clapton walking down the street with his guitar, before making it to that bar where he plugs in and starts his set. I give a lot of shit to advertising, and to be clear this ad is lowkey silly – Clapton actually walking on foot to a gig, carrying his own gear, playing a small venue like this, yeah sure – but I do respect the craft. Goddamn does this commercial make me want to drink that beer.

That’s the context for Neil Young’s masterpiece video, “This Note’s for You,” which recreates that Mick ad in full, and I know it’s not the point of the video but one of the things I get from it is that Neil could have totally sold beer if he wanted to. There were two other rock-star Michelob ads in 1987, one with Steve Winwood and the other with Genesis (singing “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,” a song that does NOT make me want a beer). They aren’t as good as the Clapton one. But Neil throws himself into it even better than Clapton does – he looks fucking awesome in this fake TV spot, with his huckster grin promising a great night if you just consume this particular brand of alcoholic beverage. Neil Young is the man!! I would totally buy something he endorsed!

But of course the reason for Neil’s coolness -- so cool he could even sell me beer -- is that he was too cool to sell beer. Neil would never! Admittedly, that’s a lot easier to say now, with Neil firmly in the pantheon of rock gods. Before “This Note’s for You,” he was adrift, with the ‘80s being a dark period where he tried his hand at all sorts of different genres and was apparently rejected by all of them. Trans, his electronica album, at least has defenders (myself included), but with all of them – techno, country, rockabilly, and finally his dreadful stab at mainstream ‘80s pop-rock – one of the major problems is that he always sings like Neil Young. A man of many talents, Neil is, but a flexible singer he is not.

And yet somehow his failures only built up his cred. Very early on, Neil Young rejected the hippie rock scene he came from (and along with it his three bandmates in CSNY, who would never transcend it). By the alt-rock era, his genre-hopping had lent him the mystique of a true artist, who would only follow his muse, money be damned. It wasn’t accidental; Neil had his eye on longevity. And for all his desire to leave the hippie scene behind and push forward, his anti-commercial stance now seems genuinely quaint.

In 1988, Neil Young tried his hand at his next genre, blues. The music video begins with an ‘80s sax player playing some very ‘80s sax, before Neil cuts him off with his guitar.  I think the idea is that Neil is cutting off this slick beer ad with his face-melting riffage, but shorn of its message, “This Note’s for You” could have easily been used in a real commercial. Neil’s band, the Blue Notes, plays tightly and soulfully. This was the closest to a successful commercial sound he had made that entire decade – in the era of George Thorogood and Stevie Ray Vaughn, “This Note’s for You” could have been genuinely mainstream, if not for the fact that Neil just isn’t a very bluesy singer. But he could put some grit on his voice, and he does his best on “This Note’s for You.” There’s power in it, and also laughter, and also some genuine contempt.

The song itself has long been overshadowed by the video and the surrounding mythology around it – it was banned from MTV for offending advertisers, they gave a lot of excuses that Neil rightly called out as bullshit, MTV still named it Video of the Year at the next VMAs. The video itself is genuinely fantastic and hilarious – as clever and funny as a Weird Al video but with a lot more bite. It was the first Neil song I knew, and the first one I loved, all credit to director Julien Temple. But the song itself is pretty good too. Neil could write epic poetry – “Thrasher” is 350 words long – but as per blues tradition, “This Note’s for You” is short and simple. I kind of marvel at the purity of the opening verse “Ain’t singing for Pepsi/Ain’t singing for Coke/Don’t sing for nobody/Makes me look like a joke.” The succinctness! It’s so pure!

I’m not sure the actual objections still resonate though. Speaking as someone who does do product endorsements, I doubt I would have felt very outraged in the ‘80s at Whitney Houston shilling for Diet Coke. For all Crosby, Stills & Nash were connected to the hippie era, they sold out immediately when they had the chance; the same year that “This Note’s for You” came out, Neil’s bandmate Graham Nash sold CSNY’s “Teach Your Children” to Apple commercials. (Neil objected strenuously to this, since his name was on it. Nash won the argument by pointing out that if Neil wanted a say in how the song was used, he could have done any actual work on it; this was one of the songs the ever-fickle Neil skipped during recording.) It’s hard to imagine any artist these days being too authentic to license their music; Neil’s anti-corporate attitude has been rendered antiquated by the collapse of the industry.

That said, I also resisted doing product endorsements for a long time, because there is admittedly something kind of undignified about it. I don’t actually care about Skillshare! I feel stupid talking about it! It’s a giant pain to get sponsor approval! I can deal with it, I do have to maintain my lavish lifestyle after all so I’m pretty comfortable with that decision. But man, there is always the feeling of slime on it. I get it, Neil.

The thing about advertising – all advertising – is that it’s faintly ludicrous. The video makes fun of Michael Jackson’s infamous head-catching-fire incident, and I’ve seen people complain that Neil shouldn’t be making fun of such a life-threatening injury. That’s a pretty modern fan attitude; back in the day I don’t think anyone objected. Perhaps if the incident had happened during a concert it would be treated seriously, but a living cartoon like Michael Jackson, at this height of his fame, having such a comical accident as his hair catching fire on the set of a Pepsi commercial? He suffered a life-threatening injury because he was selling a fucking soft drink? That last detail just makes it too ridiculous to not laugh at. And while we’re on the topic, what even were the Cola Wars? Billions of dollars spent, dominating the zeitgeist, to get people to pick one soda over the other. “I got the real thing,” sings Neil. That was Coke’s slogan, and they’ve found many ways to emphasize the “realness” of their artificial sugar water over the years. The real thing. The fuck does that mean? The only realness in the conversation belongs to Neil. He’s real, man!

A year after this, Neil became hot shit again. “Rockin’ in the Free World” is generally considered the song that launched his career comeback, but “This Note’s for You” and its anti-commercial attitude probably did as much to endear him to the early ‘90s “Corporate Rock Still Sucks” crowd, even if Neil made a big gaudy MTV video to do it. That anti-advertising attitude didn’t last very long before advertisers figured out how to exploit it; everything becomes a commodity. But “This Note’s for You” holds up long after the attitude that spawned it has become passe, partially because the song rocks and partially because Neil is one of the few people who doesn’t sound like he’s lying. The man stuck to his guns. Fuck off, Miller gang!