Remember When Neil Young Took on Corporate Rock and MTV With a Controversial Video in 1988?

Neil Young wasn’t exactly biting the hands that fed him on his 1988 song “This Note’s For You”. He was more so drawing a line in the sand, letting everybody know that common practices at that time among rock and rollers didn’t quite work for him.

Videos by American Songwriter

When Young made a video for the song, he entered into a whole new fight against the most powerful force in the music business at that time. And, in typical Young fashion, he came out on top with his integrity intact.

Neil Being Neil

You never knew what you were going to get from Neil Young in the 80s. An album’s worth of defiantly non-commercial music? That was Trans in 1982. How about a rockabilly tribute? He had you covered with Everybody’s Rockin’ in ’83.

As for This Note’s For You, credited to Neil Young & The Bluenotes, the Canadian legend added horns to his sound, all the better to handle the R&B-styled material he was writing. Released in 1988, there’s a good chance that the album would have come and gone like those other one-off projects without much fanfare if not for the title track.

Young thought the song was silly when he wrote it. He was simply lashing out at the corporatization of pop and rock music, a phenomenon that reached a particular peak in the 80s. That trend directly went against everything that Young believed, as he had never licensed his music for commercials of any kind.

Notes for “Note”

“This Note’s For You” took aim at various corporations. In some cases, he directly name-checked them (a la Pepsi and Coke). He also hinted at other companies, such as when mentioning “Spuds”, a reference to Bud Light spokesdog Spuds MacKenzie.

Young had mostly been a holdout from the video boom of the 80s. But he saw a perfect opportunity to skewer some of the targets mentioned in the song, as well as those like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston who performed for them, via a humorous clip. He hired Julien Temple, about the hottest video director there was at the time, to helm the clip.

It should have been a natural for MTV. But when Young submitted it to the network, they turned him down. They claimed to be worried about Young infringing on various trademarks while also insisting the direct mentions of the various companies went against their standards for product placement. But they should have known better that Neil Young wasn’t the type to go down without a fight.

Young Gets the Last Laugh

Young sent an open letter to the network, one that received quite a lot of notoriety when picked up by the press. He called the heads of MTV “spineless twerps,” while wondering if the M in the network’s name stood for “money” instead of “music.”

Realizing they’d been outflanked, MTV quickly went into damage control. Not only did they agree to play the “This Note’s For You” video, but they also turned it into a special event. Instead of being censored, Young’s song ended up getting the widest possible exposure.

In many ways, “This Note’s For You” helped put Neil Young on the map for a younger audience who might not have known much of his classic stuff. It helped set the table for Freedom, the 1989 LP that made him a critical darling again and led to a career resurgence. Not bad for a song he originally thought was no more than a lark.

Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images