Pete Townshend discusses unlikely modern rockstars
The Who’s Pete Townshend is never shy to give his thoughts on the modern music industry. Typically though, his views are clouded in negativity. However, Townshend seems to have changed his tune of late, safe in the belief that rock music is in good health.
In 2007, Townshend declared the death of rock ‘n’ roll and lost faith in the younger generation to carry the torch. He felt very few artists were using music as a vehicle of protest, and rock ‘n’ roll had lost the authentic fury that once fuelled it.
In a blog post, he wrote: “I think rock music is about to throw off some of its testosterone-driven defiance. Wherever I look today I see younger musicians demanding a new level of intimacy from their audience. This is not entirely about protest, rather about music performed gently that expresses a single idea, even anger is delivered gently.”
However, in an interview with the New York Times in 2021, Townshend accepted that rock music no longer had the same definition as it did when The Who began. Over the years, the genre has constantly evolved and is more than a sound or hit song, it’s the voice of the youth.
While the contemporary musical landscape is incomparable to how it was when Townshend began his career, the examples he provided of modern rockstars were wide of the mark. Although, he did also say: “There are very few people truly authentic to the cause: David Byrne. Mick Jagger. Neil Young. Joni Mitchell. Deborah Harry.”
Authentic is the key word for Townshend, and even though he admits that authenticity is an attribute that he lacks, The Who man is still a rockstar. In his eyes, anybody who can put on a live performance in a stadium is deserving of the mantle. Therefore, according to Townshend’s metric, Adele, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift are the faces of modern rock, despite their sound suggesting otherwise.
He explained: “Authentic to the perceived, accepted ideal of a rock star. Now, online, you’ll see a throwaway statement – ‘rock is dead’ – which is something that we in our genre have been considering since the ’70s. But what is rock? Rock is hip-hop. Rock is probably Taylor Swift. Rock is, dare I say it, Adele and Ed Sheeran. They’ve dared to take on that mantle, and they have to deliver. They’ve got to do something spectacular as performers. Not just as recording artists.”
Townshend continued: “They’ve got to do something amazing, and if it includes dancers, if it includes too much video, then they’re cheating. They know that, we know that, and the audiences know that. That’s why audiences will come to something like a Who concert or a Stones concert, where there might be some video, there might be a symphony orchestra, but at the end of the day it’s about: ‘Can you dance for two and a half hours without dropping dead? Can you sing without lip-syncing for two and a half hours?’ It’s about sport. It’s about entertainment as a physicality. It’s about an endurance test.”
While Ed Sheeran or Adele wouldn’t call themselves rockstars, that only furthers Townshend’s point about the lack of modern traditional rockstars in the mould of old. Of course, rock music is still alive, and there are still plentiful people holding the mantle; you just have to look further to find it than before.
