Saturday, January 3, 2015

Short And Sweet Shout-Out To The Who

They were Britain's best of that generation--see what I did there?--followed closely by the Kinks and not at all by anyone else until Cream came around and used Clapton as a sideman.  The Beatles were a decent pop band, but were 51% a boring media construct; the Stones were no more than 25% as good as they thought they were; Zeppelin was risible garbage from the start; everybody else.  The thing about the Who was the power; Townshend didn't always fully realize his artistic ideas, but the Who were an object lesson in powerful music as art in the way none of those other bands could imagine.  If the Clash was ever Britain's best at some point later, the Mekons took that way forever with Fear and Whiskey.

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