Why Pete Townshend feels he unlocked a higher purpose in music: “I was the first to articulate that”
The Who came thundering into pop culture to such a roaring extent that they almost moved too quickly for the mainstream. As frontman Roger Daltrey recently explained: “It’s never the most popular rock or the most popular anything really but it sits in a very unusual place.” In their history, they have had two number two singles, but have never reached the number one spot. However, Pete Townshend would argue that they might not have been the biggest commercial triumph, but they were more than big enough to blaze a very important trail.
As Daltrey explained to the Belfast Telegraph: “It doesn’t sit in a pocket that dates, you play some of our records today and they sound as modern as they did the day they were released.” Concluding: “I think it’s the style that (Pete) Townshend writes in and the position of his psychology that you wrote from, this is so different than anything else that’s out there.”
While Townshend’s writing might hold mythical weight, he would argue that he was well aware of the power he was trying to place in his music. With The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, he noticed a shift that he wanted to channel to a new height. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band. He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy,” he told Apple Music.
With riots running rampant, Presidents being assassinated and the world looking for direction amid an explosion of pop culture, he set about a new type of song. “Music even today is about much more than that. It has a function which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be. […] And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it.”
As Bob Dylan – the man who many might argue beat Townshend to the punch – also declares in his memoir: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.”
If you wanted an emblem for Townshend’s contribution on this front, you need to look no further than ‘My Generation’. It is a song that tries to make sense of the times with a vivified roar. Looking back, it is almost akin to the inverse of Hunter S. Thompson’s words when he wrote: “Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
