"At a concert in Cancun on January 23, Dave Matthews and guitarist Tim Reynolds performed a cover of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Ohio." That song was, of course, written by Neil Young as a fuck-you to the Nixon administration after the killing of four unarmed college students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970. The band released the song a month after those murders; it was a top-20 hit that remains in rotation on classic rock stations today."
"When Matthews sang it in Mexico as a form of protest against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, towards the end he added a refrain from "Killing in the Name," the cacophonic Rage Against the Machine anthem from 1992 written as a fuck-you to police brutality. As he and Reynolds strummed their acoustics, Matthews sang: Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me Then back into:"
"Maybe lots of artists should make the unsafe choice of covering "Ohio" right now. Maybe they should play it live, or record it in their living rooms, until every social media platform is teeming with "Ohio" covers, the collective power of repetition and interpretation swelling into a great wave of anger and hope and, if we're lucky, change. Grammy nominees, Super Bowl halftime performers, country stars, hip-hop stars, indie stars, pop stars."
Dave Matthews and guitarist Tim Reynolds performed a cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Ohio" in Cancun on January 23. Neil Young wrote "Ohio" after National Guardsmen killed four unarmed college students at Kent State in 1970; the song was released a month later and became a top-20 hit. Matthews added a refrain from Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" while protesting the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, singing explicit defiance and returning to "Four dead in Ohio." The performance felt poignant in Mexico given the shared border. Alex Pretti was murdered the next morning. The performance prompted calls for many artists to cover "Ohio" to amplify protest across genres and platforms.
Read at Esquire
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