Song Interpretations
Won't Get Fooled Again, The Who
April 17, 2007
On the internet there are a number of quality websites devoted to film.. but nothing like these exist for popular music. Film has a well developed critical language.. in plenty of colleges and universities you could take courses on film or even get a major in film studies. Just try to major in popular music. Yet this is our Romanticism! In the way that English majors work through 19th century authors.. students will someday listen to the major creators of rock music.
I don't throw around "Romanticism" lightly. There is a parallel between the flowering of rock music and the poetry that came to the fore at the start of the 19th century. We can begin with the spirit of revolution that both periods inherited. The essay by M.H. Abrams entitled "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" provides a helpful quotation from Robert Southey, contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge:
"Few persons but those who have lived in it," Southey reminisced in his Tory middle age, "can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race."
The Sixties awakened similarly radical hopes. Even amid the turbulence of those times, the positive sense of a new beginning is clear to anyone who studies the period.
Plenty of rock songs celebrate that new world of the Sixties. We could do worse than simply reading over the roster of the performers at Woodstock in 1969. Even more interesting, however, are the songs that come out in the early to mid 1970s.. detailing the failure of the Sixties. Visionary hopes gave way to more sober assessments.. and it is perhaps in this disappointment that we find the best and purest expressions of Romanticism.
Here again I see a parallel with the Romantic poets of the 19th century. These poets may have been inspired by the French Revolution and come of age expecting great things.. but their strongest work is often an effort to come to grips with the failure of political movements. I cite M.H. Abrams again:
In the other Romantic visionaries, as in Wordsworth, naive millenialism produced mainly declamation, but the shattered trust in premature political revolution and the need to reconstitute the grounds of hope lay behind the major achievements. And something close to Wordsworth's evolution—the shift to a spiritual and moral revolution which will transform our experience of the old world—is also the argument of a number of the later writings of Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and, with all his differences, Holderlin.
That passage can easily be transferred to the central artists of rock music. The height of the Sixties elicited straightforward "declamation" but disillusionment stirred their greatest work.
Item A is the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who. The chorus expresses perfectly the movement from public hopes to private vision:
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
The narrator finds himself surrounded by newness.. a new constitution, new revolution, and "change all around". His attitude toward this change is an ambiguous "smile and grin". He is willing to recognize the new world.. "tip his hat" to the new order.. but he stops well short of embracing it.
The next lines are the central ones of the song: "Pick up my guitar and play/ Just like yesterday". This marks a retreat into a private world of artistic creation. Furthermore, it is a return to "yesterday"—not a step into the tomorrow of the new constitution and new revolution. Finally, from within this private world he prays "We don't get fooled again." Get fooled by what? The intemperate hopes of the Sixties, I would say.
The verses of the song uniformly underline the uselessness of historical change:
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that' all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war
Needless to say, this is hardly a conservative credo. There are no warm fuzzies for the system of the past. The message is not: change is bad, we should go back to the old ways. No, this revolution really did "liberate from the foe".. but the problem is that's all it did. At the end of the day the world looks pretty much like it did at the start.. which is to say crappy.
At the very end of the song the inanity of revolution gets concisely stated:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Which explains why a person should not take part in a revolution.. there is no changing the world.. there is only the historical certainty of a new boss.
With that negative assessment of real change we can listen again to those important lines: "Pick up my guitar and play/ Just like yesterday". But play for whom? That is to me the mystery and interest of the Who. What seems like a private and quietist message is delivered with the rattling of Pete Townshend's power chords and the bombast of Keith Moon's drums.. not to mention Roger Daltrey's throaty voice. The Who were famous for the decibel level of their concerts. But perhaps the extreme noise level goes hand in hand with this message. The noise literally pushes all other concerns outside the hall.. it serves to create a private and shared experience. And the ritual smashing of guitar at the end of the concert? A way to further emphasize the private and unique aspect of the rock concert.. which at its heart is a way to "not get fooled again"..
more song interpretations:
My Sweet Lord, George Harrison
The Village Green Preservation Society, The Kinks
