Who's on first: the greatest rock band

Commonweal, Jan 13, 1995 by Frank McConnell

But their stunning performances were, really, only an extension of the high and acute self-consciousness of their songs. I've said that there is something inescapably factitious about rock-as-rebellion. But "factitious" doesn't--or doesn't have to--mean "false." The Who's music, from the beginning, was exuberant, driving, and profoundly aware of itself as artifice, as the performance of defiance. It was, much as I hate the term, post-modern rock.

Take their first big hit, "My Generation": "People try to put us down/Just because we get around/Things they do look awful cold/Hope I die before I get old." Anarchic? You bet. But the lyrics are so deliberately jejune; and as Daltrey sings them, impersonating the defiant young mod, he deliberately stammers over every initial consonant. So that "My G-g-generation" is at once wonderful, strong music, keen-teen rebellion, and a wry, sly undercutting of the idea of rebellion as market commodity. If Elvis had had that degree of irony about what he really represented, he'd probably be alive today.

And that degree of intelligence characterized all the group's best work: especially their 1968 masterwork, the "Rock Opera" Tommy (now a smash hit on Broadway and also a successful movie), which seemed destined to become the one authentic rock 'n' roll myth. It's the story of a traumatized, deaf, dumb, and blind boy who, miraculously, is a wizard at pinball ("Ain't got no distractions,/Can't hear no buzzers and bells"). He becomes a popular sensation, a popcult messiah, until he is cured by his disciples' adoration of him. And then when he tries to teach the faithful to follow his own strange path of self-discovery, they turn on him ("We forsake you/Gonna rape you/Let's forget you, better still"). All this on two LPs with, mind you, some of the best rock ever recorded.

I'm amazed that no one that I know of has realized that Tommy is a brilliant and bitter little parable about media stardom altogether. "Messiahship" in a culture of perfect information is inevitably debased by the very means of its promulgation: a gospel as best-seller is, as best-seller, no gospel at all. Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1956), observed that you can't have a real underground under perfect capitalism, just because as soon as you foment your underground, it itself becomes part of the market economy ("Authentic Red Guard blue jeans now at Sears--as low as $14.95!"). The Who knew it, too--and made thirty years of righteous, smart music out of it.

And that's why the VH1 Who-fest was so moving and so melancholy. Since at least the early eighties, rock--no one with an ear can doubt it--has become progressively cynical, Vegas-style showbiz or, if not that, progressively self-destructive and self-loathing about its own popularity. (Kurt Cobain, the brilliant leader of the group Nirvana, killed himself because, he said, he "didn't believe in the music anymore"--pathetic and heartbreakingly understandable). But Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwhistle--and so many others--for a while at least created something of real value, something that was both commodity and art, and that managed to assert the value of artistic intelligence even in our ironic age. It is an extraordinary accomplishment. To understand The Who, I think, is to understand rock 'n' roll--and to understand something about the perils and chances of the imagination in the age of the infonet.