The 1969 Who album Pete Townshend thinks has become our “tragic” reality in 2026
Somehow, there are countless songs from the 1960s that still hold up today – not just because they’re great, but because they also hold up a mirror to modern society in ways that seem startlingly forward-thinking. Pete Townshend, for instance, believes that The Who’s magnum opus still tackles “many issues that we deal with today”.
Before the arrival of this material, The Who were already revolutionising the rock scene in other innovative ways. A Quick One, for instance, raised the bar for conceptual storytelling, demonstrating the power of sophisticated lyricism and expression in ways that forecasted the emergence of their later masterpieces, Tommy and Quadrophenia.
‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’, in particular, became a major source of inspiration for countless rock and rock-adjacent bands, including The Beatles, a fact that Paul McCartney himself later confirmed when he told Townshend it was precisely the kind of material that they were working towards with records like Sgt Pepper.
And then when Tommy came along, the band established an entirely new avenue for rock, pushing these throughlines even further and completely refining everything they were previously about. Following the healing and spiritualistic story of the catatonic Tommy Walker, Tommy proved that the concept album could still be resonant during a particularly uncertain time in music, with many themes that still very much hold up today.
Given its story, there’s obviously a lot of trauma involved in Tommy, especially with how Walker’s witnessing of his father’s murder leaves him without the ability to see or hear, and the journey he embarks on afterwards. In today’s world, you could argue that many factors of the modern age achieve the same feat, with certain things in our immediate environments – people, technology, social media – leaving us in similar states of disconnection.
A big part of this is represented by the mirror in Tommy, specifically, the way we consume things and the consequences of those pieces of us being taken away due to what we’ve been through. They might not necessarily be soiled in the same ways that Walker’s physical and mental state are in the story, but according to Townshend, there are definite similarities there that are hard to ignore.
For instance, according to Townshend, modern social media can be compared to the mirror, especially in how it exacerbates struggles in younger people, like anxiety, depression, and losing grip on the real world. In fact, in his mind, this is a “very adept, very succinct” reflection of the “kids growing up” today, which is “tragic”, because these are precisely the things he observed when he was growing up. And now, he has to witness history repeating itself.
When Townshend wrote Tommy, he was reflecting on his own upbringing in postwar Britain – at the time, he ruminated on the way he and many others were constantly reminded of the mistakes of the generation before, and believed it’d be a “shame” if the same were to happen again… The main issue he sees now is the same sense of abandonment the kids had back then, when kids nowadays “need to be guided and cared for”.
And although some of the challenges they face today are different, the basic principle remains the same: that most people fail to look inward to find belonging, even after experiencing intense psychological trauma, and that the worst part is that nobody ventures to look after these people, either, too caught up in trivial matters to recognise the darkness and corruption around them.
