What does “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” mean in The Who song ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’?
In 1971, The Who were at the top of their game. Even for a band who’d already made a career out of throwing caution to the wind, their fifth album was an extraordinarily bullish statement. Its title alone, Who’s Next, was brimming with confrontational swagger thinly veiled beneath a pun on their name.
The album’s opener ‘Baba O’Riley’ sets the tone, but its epic closer ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ escalates things to a bombardment of hard rock capable of shaking the foundations of any music venue on earth. “We’ll be fighting in the streets,” singer Roger Daltrey begins, following a whirlwind of power chords and drums. And that’s just for starters.
‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ openly describes a violent revolutionary uprising in which “the shotgun sings the song”. Daltrey and Townshend spell it out even more plainly when they harmonise in the song’s chorus about tipping their “hat to the new constitution” and supporting “the new revolution”. There are clear echoes of the May 1968 revolution in France three years earlier, which also inspired Thunderclap Newman’s single ‘Something in the Air’ (produced by Townshend) and The Rolling Stones song ‘Street Fighting Man’.
It’s hardly surprising that Townshend was happy to write song lyrics so brazenly eulogising revolutionary action, guns and all. He was, after all, a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party throughout the 1960s. Yet the final lyrical couplet of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ reveals a different attitude to the events described in the rest of the song.
So, who is the “boss”?
In the track’s final verse, Townshend’s lyrics suddenly give us a reading of the situation completely at odds with how it starts. Now, “nothing in the street looks any different” from what came before
He’s describing the process of a revolution turning into a counter-revolution, during which power is consolidated by those at the top, and a popular movement dissipates. The “parting on the left” of society becomes a reactionary “parting on the right” instead. And everything seems to go backwards, to the extent that nothing appears to have changed.
Following this verse, an organ interlude builds to a crescendo with a Keith Moon drum solo before Daltrey releases the most eviscerating scream in rock history. Then he utters the song’s final words, double-tracking his vocals to lend them additional gravitas: “Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss”.
If we take these lines in the context of the rest of the song, the “new boss” being referred to is the head of state or government in the country which has supposedly experienced revolutionary change. The “old boss” was the political figurehead deposed by the revolution.
These words are the song’s most profound, as they reflect the limitations of the revolutionary movements which unfolded in the decade preceding its recording. In May 1968, French young people and workers shook the world, but President Charles De Gaulle remained in power. The anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States had revolutionary implications, but they didn’t stop arch-conservative Richard Nixon from coming to power.
In the Soviet, Eastern Bloc, and former colonial countries that Townshend’s Communist Party comrades supported, revolutionary movements that overthrew oppressive regimes generally resulted in the installation of other oppressors with different puppet masters. Revolution isn’t an easy business.
That’s why The Who resorted to getting on their knees and praying. Plenty of politicians promise fundamental change. But Townshend’s words suggest that time and again, supporting these politicians proves to be a fool’s errand, leading only to broken promises.
