Cortez's Influence On Aztec Culture

As a lover of most types of rock music, I find myself listening to quite the array of songs from all sorts of artists. From recent hard rockers such as Seether and System of a Down, to more classical performers such as Styx or Aerosmith, they each created songs with many unique meanings to them, even with the more recent artists sticking to love. One soft rocker of the 1970’s, however found a meaning to write and perform a song concerning the events of the conquistadors’ arrival to the Americas, more specifically, Cortez and his invasion of the Aztec society. Neil Young, along with the group known as Crazy Horse, wrote and released a song in 1975 known as “Cortez the Killer,” and while it never even made the top 200’s in Billboards during that time, it can still enlighten us with the history that Young’s lyrics possess.

While the lyrics were, for the most part, accurate, there are points that Young makes that are far from the truth. His lyrics state that “War was never known” to the Aztecs, when, in fact, war was quite common among them and the lower tribes, whom which they enslaved and deemed insubordinate (Kennedy, pg. 16). However, Neil Young was correct with Cortez finding Montezuma (or Moctezuma, as spelt by Mr. Brinkerhoff in his article “Reexamining the Lore of the ‘Archetypal