(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 1 October 2025 17:00, UK
The era that Neil Young was brought up in almost feels like a bygone era for pop music.
Young never wanted to serve any corporate suit whenever he played his music, and while he did have a lot of great tunes to make on his own, there’s a good chance that some of his career moves would have got him dropped from his label in no time today. But Young would rather die by his own sword than have to cater to whatever corporate schlock had come up to replace his brand of music.
Because when looking at the pop industry today, the late 1960s felt like a musical utopia in many respects. Not everyone had to have the greatest tunes of all time in their arsenal, but it was still about the concept of sharing music before the more money-hungry members of the music industry started to turn their noses up at mavericks that didn’t play by the rules. And it’s not like Young couldn’t already see this coming, either.
Throughout the 1980s, there was already the Everybody’s Rockin’ debacle for him to deal with after David Geffen demanded a rock record out of him. But when MTV started catering to bands that were about fashion more than musicianship, ‘This Note’s For You’ might as well have been a personal middle finger from Young. He knew that everything had become a commercial in many respects, but even when grunge brought a silver lining to everything, no one was expecting pop music to swing all the way back in the other direction.
I mean, look at the music in 1993 compared to the music in 1999, for example. The biggest names in music in the former year were people like Nirvana and Pearl Jam breaking down barriers for new artists to thrive, and yet in 1999, people had to deal with the massive influx of boy bands slowly taking over the world or the pop-punk phenomenon that was starting to take shape.
That’s not to say that those eras weren’t classics in their own way, but when the pop starlets started coming out again, Young didn’t have much time for Britney Spears on the charts. The tunes sounded great, but ‘Uncle Neil’ already had a bit of a bias considering Spears’s history of being a Disney kid before becoming one of the biggest stars in the world.
As far as he could tell, there was never any substance to what Spears was doing, saying in 2003, “[That music is] all backfiring. “It’s all too slick and it’s all going away, soon. Britney Spears — she’s peaked. It was a great success for a while, but you can’t keep doing that. You gotta go further, you gotta have some depth, and the kids are realising that.”
Then again, there are always going to be artists that don’t have much substance that end up hanging around for the long haul purely based on the tunes. Madonna may have used her image to her advantage throughout her time in the spotlight, and yet she was big enough to get one of the most eye-catching onscreen moments of the 2000s when she performed with Spears and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Awards.
But it might simply come down to the way that fans see their pop stars most of the time. There are bound to be those like Young that are more interested in what an artist has to say, and there are others that only care if a song gets them moving, and even if Spears has had her ups and downs in her career, there’s a reason why people still have so much fondness for tunes like ‘Baby One More Time’.
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