ABSTRACT
The chapter reads Young’s negotiations of American history throughout his career as a subtle and forceful intervention into debates over national identity and the politics of memory. Though Young’s work superficially appears to uphold the distinction between an idealized “America the Beautiful” on the one hand and the genocide of Native Americans and deep-seated racism on the other, a range of textual and musical strategies make the latter so central to American history as to radically question the distinction. Examples range from 1970s negotiations of slavery and racism in “Southern Man” and “Alabama” and references to the genocide of Native Americans in “Pocahontas” or “Cortez the Killer” via Young’s soundtrack to Jarmusch’s 1995 anti-Western Dead Man, the radical if subtle probing into genocide and “manifest destiny” on Young’s 2006 protest album, Living With War, the dark side of Young’s folksy Americana (2012), explorations of the entanglements between capitalism and environmental destruction (The Monsanto Years, 2015) all the way to his recent revival of classic protest songs in his 2020 COVID lockdown EP, The Times. In addition to the discussion of textual and musical strategies, Young’s role as a Canadian-born “Inoutsider” to the U.S. will also play a role here.
