A Timeless Wavelength

Neil Young – Cortez the Killer

Rock music has long been a voice for social change, but socially conscious musicians don’t usually hire fact checkers.  “Cortez the Killer,” Neil Young’s epic critique of colonialism, demonstrates the downside of this deficiency.  If all you had to go on was this song, you’d come away with an undeservedly favorable picture of the Aztec empire.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great song, one of my favorites in Young’s lengthy catalogue.  And the basic message isn’t a bad one. The Aztecs certainly didn’t deserve their fate at the hands of los conquistadores. But that’s no reason to paint them as a Utopian society where “hate was just a legend, and war was never known” until the Spanish showed up.  In fact, the Aztecs and their various neighbors had been in an almost constant state of warfare for nearly a century by the time Cortés arrived.  The song makes only a brief mention of ritual sacrifice, without specifying that it was human sacrifice, or indicating the sheer scale of the practice.  To hear Neil Young tell it, you’d think the Spanish had invaded Smurf Village.  The whole thing reads like something that would have been written by a high school student — which, quite possibly, it was:  the young Young is said to have penned the lyrics during a high school history class.

If this rumor is true, it gives me a whole new respect for this song, and for Neil Young.  Everybody with any creative ambition at all wrote some terrible poetry in high school, and most of us would be horrified at the thought of any of that teenage doggerel gaining a wider audience.  But Neil Young took this adolescent verse, with all its flaws, and turned it into a truly moving song beloved by millions.  It’s a perfect example of Brian Eno’s observation that artistic beauty often comes from garbage.

1. Geskkilener says:

   April 1, 2010 at 7:34 am

   where did you read this?