Fresh from a day of delivering optimistic prognoses about how Ukraine would fare in the war with Russia despite gloomy news from the front lines, U.S. Secretary of State and amateur musician Antony Blinken may have thought he had the perfect upbeat song to perform with a Kyiv bar band on his fourth visit to the capital since the conflict began in 2022.
Fresh from a day of delivering optimistic prognoses about how Ukraine would fare in the war with Russia despite gloomy news from the front lines, U.S. Secretary of State and amateur musician Antony Blinken may have thought he had the perfect upbeat song to perform with a Kyiv bar band on his fourth visit to the capital since the conflict began in 2022.
“I know this is a really, really difficult time,” Blinken told a packed crowd in the subterranean club Barman Dictat on Tuesday night.
“Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously,” he said. “But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world, and the free world is with you, too.”
With those words and strumming a red guitar, Blinken and the local group 19.99 launched into Neil Young’s hit “Rockin’ in the Free World,” ostensibly to encourage Ukrainians to keep up the fight against Russia and hold to their Western aspirations, despite numerous battlefield setbacks that led President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day later to cancel all his upcoming foreign trips.
With its refrain “Keep on rockin’ in the free world,” Young’s 1989 song sounds like it should be an homage to the glory of living in the West, uncompromised by communism or authoritarianism. In fact, as numerous social media critics noted, the tune is a lament about despair and misery caused by homelessness, drug addiction and poverty in the celebrated free world.
