Sunday, May 28, 2006

Pete Townshend responds to "Won't Get Fooled Again" being named the greatest conservative rock song

It's not just Beatles' songs that get interpreted, reinterpreted, or in some cases, misinterpreted.

Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who is one of those songs, says the man who wrote it, Pete Townshend.

From that skinny bloke's web site:

I am just a song-writer. The actions I carry out are my own, and are usually private until some digger-after-dirt questions my methods. What I write is interpreted, first of all by Roger Daltrey. Won't Get Fooled Again - then - was a song that pleaded '….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….'. But when Roger Daltrey screamed as though his heart was being torn out in the closing moments of the song, it became something more to so many people. And I must live with that. In the film Summer of Sam the song is used to portray white-boy 'street' idiocy; a kind of fascist absurdity, men swinging their arms over air-guitars and smashing up furniture. Spike Lee told my manager that '…he deeply understood Who music….'. What he understood was what he himself - like so many others - had made it. He saw an outrage and frustration, even a judgment or empty indictment in the song that wasn't there. What is there is a prayer.

Later today I'm going to post some lyrics from a Who song which I don't think I'm misinterpreting.

Hat tip to The Corner on National Review.

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