The genre that Pete Townshend believes replaced rock and roll: “The music of the street”
Rock and roll becoming immortal wasn’t exactly something that the progenitors of the genre had in mind.
The idea of having guys with guitars playing dance music felt like a purely adolescent pastime, and while there are still great artists falling under the rock banner to this day, there are still millions of others that seem to cater to the glory days of the genre instead of breaking any new ground.
Rock might not be as popular, but if you were to ask Pete Townshend, the genre had worn out its welcome long ago.
Townshend had come in when the genre was peaking in England with the eclectic mix of rock, soul, and R&B going on, but the music he grew up on was already starting to change. People like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had opened up people’s minds to what rock and roll could be beyond the traditional Chuck Berry chords, and while Townshend tried his hand at making bold new innovations, not all of them were exactly cut out for being massive rock and roll tunes.
For instance, the song ‘Pinball Wizard’ is among one of the most celebrated songs in the band’s catalogue, but it’s not exactly following the same structure that Buddy Holly or Little Richard did in their prime. Townshend was now focusing on playing with people’s expectations of what a rock and roll song could be, and even if it didn’t always fit some people’s definition of what rock should sound like, it was better for him to move on and make something new than spend time spinning his wheels.
But if there was one thing uniting all those early rock and rollers, it was the fact that they all came from the streets. This was outsider music that suddenly managed to find its way above ground and reach the masses, so once it blew up and became normal for everyone, it wouldn’t be considered against the grain anymore. Now, it was only normal pop music, and for Townshend, all the dangers of rock needed to be moved elsewhere.
There would occasionally be people like Oasis who came from underground to become stars, but Townshend always felt that the future of the genre lay in rap music, saying, “Rap and hip-hop is the music of the street today. The street is where rock came from. I am a huge fan of rap – even Eminem has a real connection to the work I did when I was young. My job as a young writer wasn’t to sell records, but to try to make music that allowed our audience to find some hope and release. What matters most is that the music does what it is supposed to do. Rap and hip-hop, for people who understand it, provides hope and release.”
And as much as some people might like to chastise Townshend for trying to sound hip with the kids these days, it’s not like he’s that far off the mark. The magic of listening to the biggest names in rock was because they seemed like gods towering over everyone else, so when someone listens to someone like Kendrick Lamar on his recent tour, they’re taking part in something not that far off from what Led Zeppelin was doing years before.
Sure, the instruments might be different, and it might have a completely different approach to the lyrics, but there are also some key elements that everyone chooses to forget. Oh, some of the rap artists rely more on lyrics than playing their instruments perfectly or focus on the message of their songs more than their musical ability? If we had to dock points for that, we would also have to take points off every single Bob Dylan album, and that’s far from what rock fans want to do.
Townshend’s claim that rap is the music of the street today is right on the money, but the idea of it replacing rock and roll in the popular consensus is the kind of thing that most people are already aware of but refuse to accept. Hip-hop may have been considered a strange new art form when it debuted in the late 1970s, but if Chuck Berry pointed the way back in the 1950s, fans should be looking to people like Run-DMC as the inventors of the new art form.
