‘It’s ICE Cold Here in America’

Neil Young kicked off the new year by scorching Donald Trump in a new op-ed on his official website, the Neil Young Archives. 

“Wake up, people!” he writes. “Today the USA is a disaster. Donald Trump is destroying America bit by bit with his staff of wannabes, people with no experience or talent, closet alcoholic wife beaters, inexperienced leaders who only know how to lie to keep favor with Trump’s falseness so they can hold their unearned positions in his inept government, a Congress full of Republicans acting like idiots with no conscience…He has divided us. How did we elect these creeps who have no spin, no values, no conscience, no way to save the USA.”

The editorial hit days after a protester was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, sparking protests in cities all over the country. “We need to take Trump at his word,” Young wrote. “Make America Great Again. It won’t be easy while he is trying to turn our cities into battlegrounds so he can cancel our elections with marshal law and escape all accountability…Something has to change this. We know what to do. Rise up. Peacefully in millions. Too many innocence people are dying.”

He concludes with sharp barbs directed at ICE. “It’s ICE cold here in America,” he wrote. “There was no ICE before Trump. No soldiers in the streets before Trump. Every move he makes is to build instability so he can stay in power…He knows nothing about love. He does not know you are. Use your love of life, your love of one another, your love of children and theirs and ours. Peacefully. Now.” (Note: It’s not literally true that ICE didn’t exist before Trump. They just weren’t engaging in these sorts of aggressive tactics to apprehend undocumented migrants.)

This is hardly the first time Young has come after Trump, even though the President is a big fan of his music. “He’s got something very special,” Trump told Rolling Stone in 2008, after we spotted him at a number of Young’s shows. “His voice is perfect and haunting. He’s 63 and I don’t think it’s changed. It’s more important than his playing, ’cause you have so many great players — but there’s just one voice like that. Whatever the hell ‘it’ is, he’s got it.”

Last summer, Young unveiled his new song “Big Crime,” which takes direct aim at Trump. “Don’t need no fascist rules,” he sings. “Don’t want no fascist schools/Don’t want soldiers on our streets/There’s big crime in DC at the White House.” The protest song was recently covered by Yo La Tengo.

Earlier in his new letter, Young says that he’s working on the 4th volume of his Neil Young Archive box sets, and he recently unearthed a new new rendition of the Blue Notes-era epic “Ordinary People,” and a Crazy Horse concert he notes is “all rare songs never played by the Horse…our first live show after our life-long producer, David Briggs had died.” 

The first Neil Young and Crazy Horse show following Briggs’s death in November 1995 was on March 13, 1996, at Old Princeton Landing in Princeton-By-The-Sea, California. It was the start of a club tour where they billed themselves as the Echoes. The show is heavy on songs from Zuma, and features the first live performance of “Stupid Girl.” But it’s unclear if this is the exact concert Young is referencing.

Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts are kicking off a European tour on June 19 in Manchester, England. As of now, there are no dates in the USA on the books. But Young recently told a fan they do plan on playing at least some American shows this year. “There will be some dates,” he wrote. “Not a lot.”