‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘All My Friends’: two kindred masterpieces four decades apart
Unless you were trying to induce an aneurysm in the minds of classic rock fans, you have probably never considered using The Who and LCD Soundsystem in the same sentence. After all, one is an energetic young rock band who became increasingly experimental as the years went on, embracing electronic music and complex compositions, and the other…hang on. OK, I am being facetious, but the fact remains that there are distinct parallels that can be drawn between the mod rockers and James Murphy’s dance-punk outfit, particularly within the distinctive tones of their most popular tracks.
Even if you are not a die-hard fan of The Who, you have probably heard the iconic synthesiser track that introduces ‘Baba O’Riley’. Edited down from its original 30-minute runtime, the five-minute epic became one of the band’s defining moments. Beloved by fans across the world, its innovative construction, owing to Pete Townshend’s fascination with electronic music, signified a thematic change in the band’s output. From their inception, The Who had been the rebellious voice of Britain’s post-war adolescence, but the 1960s was over, and the band were forced to mature. No track better exemplifies that growth than ‘Baba O’Riley.
With its imagery of “teenage wasteland” and “Let’s get together before we get much older”, The Who’s track was an ode to the joy and heartbreak of fleeting youth, much like LCD Soundsystem and their 2007 track ‘All My Friends’. Taken from their second album, Sound of Silver, the song is enmeshed with feelings of adolescent euphoria and nostalgia. On a surface level, the tracks are virtually indistinguishable, but the longer you listen, the more you start to hear the similarities.
For starters, both songs start with a ridiculously infectious modulating synthesiser track before delving into the joy and regret of youth. In many ways, the songs achieve the same ends, though they were made for vastly different generations.
The Who were an iconic group for the baby boomer generation, and so their song has an underlying context of countercultural revolution and a new age for young people worldwide. Contrastingly, LCD Soundsystem came about at a time during which the younger generation had very little to be happy about, other than their own personal relationships and friend groups.
Contextually, the two songs are worlds apart; the 1960s and the 2000s shared very few similarities. After all, the rebellious young generation of ‘Baba O’Riley’ had come to power by this point and promptly restricted virtually everything that allowed them to have the peace-loving, free-and-easy adolescence they had loved so much. No amount of rose-tinted spectacles could make the early 2000s seem like a joyous time; it was storied by fear, economic recession, and regressive social policy, among other things.
If you take away their surrounding contexts, however, the two tracks are incredibly similar both in theme and composition. Although LCD Soundsystem are distinctly modern in sound, it is hard to imagine that The Who’s ode to wasted youth was not at least partially responsible for the inspiration behind ‘All My Friends’. James Murphy created the ‘Baba O’Riley’ for the millennial age, and both tracks still hold up to this day.
