Yeah, That's Them

I don't know if I have written about this before. It's kind of silly. Let's just say. My parents were in college between 1965 and 1969 and if there is a group of four years during which it is better to be in college in the 20th century, let me know. I mean, there are probably more profound years sure. World War One and Two happened between 1900 and 2000 I know you know but.

So what's crazy about me is that even though I moved far beyond my parents' aesthetic preferences years ago, um. 

That's just another way of me saying that, contrary to my father's love of The Beatles and my Mother's love of the Stones, well, at the risk of coming across as if I am just a rebellious child and not a principled adult, I have to re-iterate my love of the Who.

Why?

I dunno. 

The reasons change annually. 

What don't change: The Stones had the best attitude and the Beatles had the best songs.

This year...

The Stones are Trump. Fuck society, do what thou willssst and all that. 

The Beatles are the Liberals, renovators. Songcraft has legs in our hands.

The Who don't belong, still.

As they shouldn't. 

Quadrophenia could only be made by believers, not leaders. They are the sound of the recipient, not the giver, the penitent, not the priest. There is no equivalent. This casts aspersions on the characters of many. Pur. Pos. Full. Ly.

Not only believers, though. Dis-enchanted ones.

The Stones and the Beatles get all the credit which is why they suck. The Stones and The Beatles are an argument amongst those who have money and who get laid and who are able to combine sperm and ovaries into progeny that reify the narcissism of the biodonors.

Quadrophenia may be the only eloquent statement of the loss of those who actually needed this shit, only to find it wasn't. Orphan music, divine music, Jesus of the Virgin. The people reading about Carnaby or Bowery or wherever sitting on a toilet dealing with distressed bowel movements and caught in wife or husband or family or preternaturally decaying wall finishes or whatever. The Who don't get the privilege of choosing the direction of humanity, they only get the sadness of choosing a direction given to them by some abstract other who doesn't, ultimately, care about what is chosen so much as the pride of being one of those who choose the choices.

The Who is the sound of regular-ass people really thinking that rock could change the world because they fucking needed the world to fucking change, and the sound of the band telling them, no, it won't, but you aren't foolish for believing so, and, actually, we love you because you do believe, like us. It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be.

And you want to talk about what now?

I hate that there are better arguments to be had about 1969 than 2019. Or I hate that I am so abstracted from that which is now that I think so. Note the time this is posted. Rock and roll.