05-27-2020, 01:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-27-2020, 06:48 PM by Eric the Green.)
Speaking of reverberations of cosmic awakenings, the current incarnation of The Who features Pete and Roger now in their 70s and Pete's younger brother Simon and Ringo's son Zak, among others, sounding as good as new, and they just released a great new album with 14 new songs. It's first track is an ironic (and maybe someday iconic?) song that has all the musical vitality and beauty of sound arrangement of earlier songs like "Won't Get Fooled Again" (see post #3 above). It's melody and words even hark back to "The Kids Are Alright" from 1966. And Roger's voice has been rehabilitated and sounds like it did 30 or 40 years ago. They are feelin it like it's 1966, and kickin it like it's 1986 now!
The lyric point of the song is that Pete doesn't mind if you steal his songs; he's done it too. "The sound that we share has already been played, and it hangs in the air" he says. " Freedom in the air " again! Just like he snipped the iconic title lyrics from the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" and Buddy Holly/Rolling Stones "Not Fade Away" for his own iconic song " My Generation ," so key for our own forum here. And the millennial boy band One Direction was accused of ripping off The Who's " Baba O'Riley " for its opening in " Best Song Ever ." It was a tribute to The Who, who had created two of the best songs ever on the album Who's Next, Baba O'Riley and (my nominee for best song ever) Won't Get Fooled Again. And in this new song, he again refers back to Buddy Holly by saying that this music will fade. But it won't fade away, because it will still hang in the air.
I report all this and the below ideas too in my essay Fly Away: The Who and Our Generations
It seems unlikely that Pete Townshend "stole" and reshaped the musical ideas in Beethoven's Leonore Overture #3 (1806) for Won't Get Fooled Again (1971, one Neptune cycle/one double saeculum later), although the latter seems obviously to have been inspired by his fellow Brit's Kenneth Clark's 1969 monumental and historic documentary "Civilization," and it's episode " The Fallacies of Hope " (embedded in post #2 above), which showed how the great French Revolution launched a new society and the romantic movement, but which brought to power new bosses which were same as the old bosses, in a cycle which was repeated over and over again in subsequent revolutions down to Pete's own time, and beyond to ours. And "The Fallacies of Hope" opened with the Leonore Overture, just as Clark said that Beethoven was the sound of European civilization again reaching for something beyond its grasp, and that we are the offspring of this romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.
It may be that Pete repeated Beethoven and Clark in archetypal cyclic synchronicity, or maybe he was inspired by them. But the resemblance between Won't Get Fooled Again and Leonore Overture #3 goes far beyond the fact that the opening notes of the main theme in each piece are almost the same. The great synthesizer riff in Won't Get Fooled Again is like an echo of the Revolution, still hanging in the air today. And Beethoven seems to have anticipated this pioneering electronic music in the way he shaped the notes in his famous descending riff in his Leonore Overture so that each note gets louder and then cuts off, as if sounding backwards like a synthesizer riff. And then each song goes on from there to end in virtually the same way. Beethoven follows this virtual synthesizer riff with an orchestral "scream" as iconic and bone-chilling as Roger's iconic scream. Then the main ascending 4-note theme is recapped, in each piece, with Roger singing "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" to the theme, and then each piece ends with some similar final razzamatazz and tonic power chords. We are sent escaping from the boss and flying away in both pieces! (the links above include these endings)
In the same new album, The Who includes another great new song that brings up the same issue of unjust imprisonment which Leonore and Florestan are faced with in Beethoven's Fidelio, just as Won't Get Fooled Again does.
The lyric point of the song is that Pete doesn't mind if you steal his songs; he's done it too. "The sound that we share has already been played, and it hangs in the air" he says. " Freedom in the air " again! Just like he snipped the iconic title lyrics from the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" and Buddy Holly/Rolling Stones "Not Fade Away" for his own iconic song " My Generation ," so key for our own forum here. And the millennial boy band One Direction was accused of ripping off The Who's " Baba O'Riley " for its opening in " Best Song Ever ." It was a tribute to The Who, who had created two of the best songs ever on the album Who's Next, Baba O'Riley and (my nominee for best song ever) Won't Get Fooled Again. And in this new song, he again refers back to Buddy Holly by saying that this music will fade. But it won't fade away, because it will still hang in the air.
I report all this and the below ideas too in my essay Fly Away: The Who and Our Generations
It seems unlikely that Pete Townshend "stole" and reshaped the musical ideas in Beethoven's Leonore Overture #3 (1806) for Won't Get Fooled Again (1971, one Neptune cycle/one double saeculum later), although the latter seems obviously to have been inspired by his fellow Brit's Kenneth Clark's 1969 monumental and historic documentary "Civilization," and it's episode " The Fallacies of Hope " (embedded in post #2 above), which showed how the great French Revolution launched a new society and the romantic movement, but which brought to power new bosses which were same as the old bosses, in a cycle which was repeated over and over again in subsequent revolutions down to Pete's own time, and beyond to ours. And "The Fallacies of Hope" opened with the Leonore Overture, just as Clark said that Beethoven was the sound of European civilization again reaching for something beyond its grasp, and that we are the offspring of this romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.
It may be that Pete repeated Beethoven and Clark in archetypal cyclic synchronicity, or maybe he was inspired by them. But the resemblance between Won't Get Fooled Again and Leonore Overture #3 goes far beyond the fact that the opening notes of the main theme in each piece are almost the same. The great synthesizer riff in Won't Get Fooled Again is like an echo of the Revolution, still hanging in the air today. And Beethoven seems to have anticipated this pioneering electronic music in the way he shaped the notes in his famous descending riff in his Leonore Overture so that each note gets louder and then cuts off, as if sounding backwards like a synthesizer riff. And then each song goes on from there to end in virtually the same way. Beethoven follows this virtual synthesizer riff with an orchestral "scream" as iconic and bone-chilling as Roger's iconic scream. Then the main ascending 4-note theme is recapped, in each piece, with Roger singing "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" to the theme, and then each piece ends with some similar final razzamatazz and tonic power chords. We are sent escaping from the boss and flying away in both pieces! (the links above include these endings)
In the same new album, The Who includes another great new song that brings up the same issue of unjust imprisonment which Leonore and Florestan are faced with in Beethoven's Fidelio, just as Won't Get Fooled Again does.