Neil Young

                                              (1975 – Featured on “Zuma,” Reprise, 1975)

I set off for the vacation of my eighteenth year with “Harvest” in the player, I watched the photographs of my life crash down from the wall where I'd stuck them the day before and put them back up to the notes of “On The Beach,” I too mourned the corpses of Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten, struggling to console my own “Tired Eyes,” I dedicated “Like A Hurricane” nine years too late to a beautiful girl who nine years earlier would have loved me without hesitation, I wrote out the lyrics of “My My, Hey Hey” on a blackboard in an empty classroom a minute after finishing my final high-school exam, just to remind my adolescence that “Once you're gone you can never come back.” Hopes, fears, the excitement of new adventures, disappointments, depressions, regrets. Whatever it was, old Neil was always there. He's always there. He's a drawer of the soul where you know you'll find what you need. A piece of life. When I'm too far down to pick myself back up alone but still too alive to resign myself to failure, I replay the solo of “Cortez The Killer” in my head. I become the solo of “Cortez The Killer.” At once a coup de grâce and the push that sets everything back in motion. Gasoline to douse the fire, pain as a remedy for pain. What can't that solo do: there's no creation quite as enormous born from a hand tormenting the strings of an electric guitar. Infinite melancholy against the backdrop of a paradise forgotten in the pages of a book that tells your story. Reinventing History. 

 

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistadores, led by Hernán Cortés, entered Mexico City, subjugating the indigenous population ruled by Emperor Montezuma II. The Aztec kingdom relied on the subjugation of neighboring tribes, used as reservoirs of human sacrifices to offer to the gods. The empire's internal instability – fueled by the resentment of subjugated peoples – and Montezuma's own naivety – who took Cortés for a kind of divine messenger – favored the Europeans' advance; in 1522 they founded, in the heart of Central America, the Iberian colony christened New Spain. 

Neil Young describes Cortés's landing on the shores of Mexico as a dreamlike vision, introduced by that livid, writhing electric solo: three minutes and twenty seconds of catharsis and agony. “Lui arrivò danzando sull’acqua/ Con le sue galee e le pistole/ Cercando un nuovo mondo/ In quel palazzo nel sole”. The epic, menacing image of the conquistadores stands opposite the mirrored, inverse image of Montezuma, lying on the beach “with his coca leaves and pearls.” The lush hedonism of a civilization about to vanish under the blows of shrewd, unscrupulous invaders is reflected in the image of Montezuma, who “in his rooms consults with the secrets of the world.” But the conquerors are more cunning and pragmatic: they take advantage of Aztec beliefs, exploiting to their own benefit Montezuma's supposed divinatory powers, as he mistakes them for demigods.

The cunning of reason against the magic of worship, the understanding of the world against its poetic invention, cognition against mystery. Neil Young openly takes the side of the indigenous people and extols their virtues: “And the women all were beautiful/ And the men stood straight and strong,” “Hate was just a legend/ And war was never known.” This is clearly a literary reconstruction of Aztec society that even justifies the barbarity of human sacrifice, deemed a necessary act to appease the wrath of the gods and win their favor (“They offered life in sacrifice/ So that others could go on”).

 

Historians and learned analysts have often railed against the idealized depiction of the Aztecs in “Cortez The Killer,” accusing Young of revisionism, of romantically embroidering the controversial and dramatic story of Montezuma's empire, one of the most brutal history remembers. But before raising any objection, one should at least have the humility to shed the academic's robes and put on the artist's. For Neil Young, the historical events of the Aztec empire are only a narrative pretext, a stage setting, the allegory of a pure, virgin universe destined to be wiped out. Cortez is the killer, metaphorically the external factor that shatters the idyll, corrupts it and annihilates it. The virus of violence that, once in circulation, can never be uprooted. The moment of infection comes for everyone sooner or later, whether it's a civilization checkmated by ruthless colonizers or the wavering individual conscience, stunned like a boxer on the brink of a knockout, by the punches of life. It's called the loss of innocence, and “Cortez The Killer” tells it like a cynical fable, an inverted parable, a legend without heroes. 

 

In the song's final part, the narration abandons the third person to adopt the first. The narrator becomes the protagonist:  “E io so che lei vive laggiù/ E che mi ama ancora oggi/ Tuttora non riesco a ricordare quando o come ho smarrito la mia strada”. The myth becomes flesh, history crumbles onto the rubble of the everyday, the downfall of the Aztec epic happens again within a microcosm. As the guitar resumes its soliloquy, at once scathing and heartfelt like a declaration of surrender with swords drawn, the echo of those words is a peremptory sentence. Nothing exists: Eden is a deception, a fleeting illusion. Montezuma has died again and has dragged his dreams underground. Love, too, lies down there, in an Atlantis that will never resurface, in a promised land disowned by everyone and left at the mercy of invaders. Everyone is their own Cortez. 

 

“By nature I'm a very destructive person, and that comes out in the way I play guitar,” Neil Young stated at the end of the recording sessions for “Zuma,” the first album recorded after the so-called trilogy of pain. “Time Fades Away” was the sadness that precedes tears, “On The Beach” was the crying itself, and “Tonight's The Night” the handkerchief that dried the tears. “Zuma” washed the pain away, but left two indelible marks on the skin. “Danger Bird” the first, “Cortez The Killer” the second. When the latter was recorded, a technical malfunction caused the loss of the final verse. Producer David Briggs told Neil, who replied laconically: “I never liked that verse anyway.”

 

“Cortez The Killer” is likely the most-covered song by the Toronto loner. Among the many (Drones, Marissa Nadler, Matthew Sweet, Screaming Females), the standouts remain the imploding interpretation by Slint  – found on a bootleg of a live show at Club Dreamerz in Chicago in 1989 – which stretches the original's aching guitar work toward the harmonic mists of “Spiderland,” and the monumental version by Built To Spill (from their 2000 “Live” album), an electric ride pouring out twenty-one minutes of psych-noise deluge. Despite the many tributes it's received over time, the Franco regime instead – failing to understand it was a bitter, beautiful metaphor – banned “Cortez The Killer” from being played on Spanish soil, deeming it an affront to national imperialism. Sometimes a lament is more subversive than a curse. Tears hit the mark better than spit. No one is more dangerous than a killer. Except a lone Canadian with a guitar.