The Who's "My Generation"
More Punk than Punk
As a sophomore in High School, I often daydreamed about spending my summers writing articles for Rolling Stone while touring the country with my favorite band. While this dream never came to fruition, it is the plot of my favorite movie: Almost Famous. Almost Famous tells the tale of a 15-year-old Rolling Stone reporter, named William Miller, making his way through rock culture in the summer of 1973. This movie rose to the top of my list for several reasons; aside from having characters with names like “Penny Lane” and acting out every musically oriented teenager’s secret fantasy, Almost Famous has a great sound track. The beginning of the movie shows William’s older sister giving him her record collection before she leaves home. As William shuffles through this ultimate compilation of classic rock vinyls, he stumbles across Tommy, by The Who, with a note that says “listen to Tommy with a candle burning and you’ll see your entire future.” Of course, the first thing I did after watching this movie was steal my Dad’s copy of “The Who Anthology.” And, while I liked Tommy, I identified much more with the style and message of The Who’s My Generation.
At that time, my association with The Who to the ‘glory days’ of rock and roll gave it a sense of aura and nostalgia. To me, this music was a remnant of a time where the function of rock and roll as a rebellious movement meant something in a larger context. I wanted to be apart of the anti-war protests or the civil-rights movement and listening to The Who seemed to be a viable way to do this by proxy. The driving tempo and power chords that characterize My Generation were also very similar to other music I was listening to at the time. I’m ashamed to say that at that point I was also going through my “punk phase” and often wore ties as belts while listening to the musical styling of bands like Blink 182, Green Day and The Ramones.
Years went by without me putting any more thought into my analysis, yet upon further examination, I have come to realize that the aforementioned similarities that I took for granted in high school actually hold a great deal of significance. After listening to The Who play My Generation, my 15-year-old self should have felt indignant, or at least duped. My Generation sheds light on the fact that there was nothing original about the “punk” bands that I had felt such an allegiance to. In fact, everything from the lyrical composition to the use of the "windmill arm" had existed since 1965. From a larger historical schema, The Who’s modernist authenticity, musical and performance techniques, and utilization of what has come to be referred to as the “shock effect” places them firmly in the ‘punk tradition’ a full ten years before the punk genre even existed.
In “Reconsidering Rock,” Kier Keightly presents the idea that authenticity can be assessed through the dichotomous ideologies of romanticism and modernism. Romantic authenticity places an emphasis on tradition and musical heritage, whereas modernist authenticity focuses on innovation, experimentation and progress (137). According to Keightly, the punk movement is fundamentally oriented towards the rejection of “the romantic mode of authenticity, in favor of a complex and nuanced Modernist strategy of authenticity (138).” This makes sense due to the punk movement’s founding ideology that rock had become a stagnant product of the commodity culture. The Who clearly believes in this modernist mode of authenticity as well, particularly as it pertains to musical innovation. For example, in 1965, My Generation was one of the first songs with a bass guitar solo. Four years later, the release of Tommy represented the advent of an entirely new genre known as the ‘rock opera’. Furthermore, The Who was among the first bands that decided to experiment with musical manipulation and synthesized sound. As a band that was always running on the edge, and certainly one step ahead of the more romantic main stream culture of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, The Who appears have been consistently and effectively engaged in the production of modernist authenticity.
Aside from technical or physical innovations, many of the Who’s musical and performance strategies, Particularly in My Generation, reflect a great deal of the characteristics that have come to define modern punk music. In “Producing Artistic Value,” Motti Regev analyzes punk music through its focus on “harsh rebellion, rough sound [and] musical simplicity (94).” While My Generation was certainly lyrically rebellious, as I will discuss later, The Who’s general stage performance was both rebellious and harshly revolutionary. They were arguably the first band to master the art of movement on stage. This experimentation with movement was how Pete Townshend coined “the windmill” which has been a long time favorite of guitarists and air guitarists alike. The band’s complementary leaps and jumps are only outdone by their uniquely original practice of smashing guitars and overturning drum sets on stage. By engaging in this type of performance, The Who exuded “harsh rebellion and rough sound” even before picking up their instruments and especially after their instruments had been destroyed. Yet, the punk rock characteristics of The Who don’t stop there. For example, In My Generation, Pete Townshend demonstrates his mastery for the type of “musically simple” power chords that later become exalted by the punk movement for their accessibility to the common man. Similarly, Keith Moon’s wild, driving and often erratic drumbeats remove the necessity for a musical crescendo. Lawrence Grossberg remarks in “Another Boring Day in Paradise,” that this replacement with “pulse” and “continuous noise” is a characterizing part of the “punk apparatus (247).” These new, innovative, and what I would deem ‘crunchy,’ musical techniques on both drum and guitar fundamentally altered the syntax of music in a way that opened the door for the punk rockers of the future and created a sense of modernist authenticity long before the punk movement was their to defend it.
In “Another Boring Day in Paradise,” Lawrence Grossberg pays tribute to Frith’s account of the “shock effect,” which he says was a defining factor for the “original punk texts (246).” Frith defines “shock effect” as a challenge to “pop and rock conventions of romance, beauty and ease” with lyrics that “focus…on social and political subject…[and] disrupt their own flow of words with their images and sounds (246).” With this definition, it seems almost as if Frith is purposely attempting to describe The Who’s My Generation. The unique sound and driving force behind My Generation certainly makes the song catchy, but it’s the lyrics and vocal techniques that seem to define this idea of “shock effect.” Seen as one of the most significant musical rallying cries for a youth rebellion against oppressive societal norms, the lyrics to My Generation not only focus on punk values of “social and political subject,” as defined by Frith, but the famous line “I hope I die before I get old” became the de-facto motto of rebellious rock, and later the punk rock movement. Additionally, the Roger Daltry stutter was both revolutionary for future punk lyrical composition and firmly within Frith’s “shock effect” characteristic of “disrupt[ing] their own flow of words with their images and sounds.” While some believe that this technique was used as a way to insinuate expletives, as could be explained by the line "Why don't you all fff... fade away!" There are others who say that Daltry was stuttering was more drug induced than creative. Either way, what I have deemed the “Daltry Stutter” has made its appearance time and again in the punk rock genre. I mean, just try to imagine the Ramones singing I Wanna Be Sedated without stumbling over the number ‘twenty’ several times.
So, does this mean that The Who was in fact America’s first punk band? They certainly demonstrate many of the characteristics that cultural theorists have come to associate with the Punk Genre, yet they produced My Generation a decade before the punk movement gained any form of exigency. Personally, I believe that The Who’s dedication to innovation, modernist authenticity, rebellion and a certain type of musical force indicate their leadership in the punk mode of production. However, to avoid confrontation by the wide array of theorists who have consciously excluded The Who from the punk movement, I will refrain from labeling them a punk band. Instead, I like to look at them as more punk than punk – after all, they were the first.
Works Cited
- Grossberg, Lawrence. "Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life." Popular Music. 4.Performers and Audiences (1984): 225-258. Print.
- Keightley, Kier. "Reconsidering Rock." The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Ed. Simon Frith, Ed. Will Straw and Ed. John Street. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 109-41. Print.
- Regev, Moti. "Producing Artistic Value: The Case of Rock Music." Sociological Quarterly. 35.1 (1994): 85-102. Print.
