Notes On Song: Won't Get Fooled Again

The Who

We'll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet, and the morals that they worship will be gone.

Let’s reboot this series with a cheerful image: Charlton Heston, bedraggled, war-ravaged, teeth clenched in constipated roar, all systems hissy. Webbed to his side is Katharine Ross, subsumed by the incessant drone of modular fighter planes, the loud new moldings of what she once cattily called her “open-air living room” back when jokes weren’t redundancies. Their children, Karen and Wally, all matted hair and bug eyes, learning to co-exist with horror like they learned to ride tricycles, clinging to their parents’ calves, peering at the end of an uncertain orange sky, Karen clutching to a rag doll with one leg and Wally holding on to a Philips head screwdriver (the G.I. Joe got blown up). Charlton, or rather his character Jed, just had his Hecker & Koch semi-automatic taken by a mute stormtrooper in olive coveralls. All he’s got is an Ontario Mark 3 Navy knife with no handle and a single can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom. The Hell’s Angels advance, tread by tread, in a single line. On the shoulders of the middle two bikers sits a grinning CEO, a composite of Henry Ford and Clarence Birdseye, knowing he’s got Jed squarely where he wants him. “Ah,” the CEO says, “all hail the suburbs’ last line of defense. Can you take a hint, Jed?” Katharine, or rather her character Marnie, starts weeping, which she’s been wanting to do for the last 45 minutes but her eyes didn’t have enough moisture since the thugs scavenged the Visine plant for childproof caps. Karen and Wally stopped verbal communication long ago, finding the mere shoving of air particles with their syllables impotent in this new podunk reality, choosing instead to use hand gestures they remember seeing from their dad the last time the landscaper screwed up the masonry on their walkway; they flip off the CEO. Jed, out of ideas, throws the soup can into the air, grabs the broken end of his Ontario Mark 3, and spins it into the darkening sky, where it pierces the can of cream of mushroom at a precise 90-degree angle, detonating the beige contents. The soup forms a funnel because of the circular jet streams that now dot Earth’s new atmosphere and directs itself into the stunned, open maw of the CEO, overwhelming his windpipe, toppling him off the bikers’ shoulders, and dispersing the Hell’s Angels in a panic. Jed raises his scuffed, bloody fist as the vinyl-sheathed beasts retreat. “How do you like your ration, you filthy daemon!!” he screams. The kids groan, wishing Jed had thought of a better tagline, but there’s no time and war is hell.

And the men who spurred us on sit in judgement of all wrong. They decide and the shotgun sings the song.

Pete Townshend, the Who’s principal songwriter, surmised that the figureheads of all that instigation had become arbiters of morality and ethics. They enjoyed the shot-calling. Pete was too self-flagellating to be one of those leaders himself. But it can’t be too hard to picture someone in a vinyl chair on his third Tom Collins quietly moving all the human objects on the ground.

So who was Pete thinking of? Politicians? Bankers? Barbers? The Reverend Billy Graham? DuPont? Zuckerberg in a time machine that’s coming in 2036 after COVID-19 wipes out an eighth of the earth? It’s hard to say, because they were faceless back then and they’re only a little less faceless now.

I’ve heard this song propped up as a conservative anthem. I see why. Pete certainly wasn’t thinking about his disappointment with the bright shiny future conservatives espoused. But I think it’s broader than that. “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is anti-naïveté. Unfortunately naïveté is one of our most powerful narcotics. Everyone sucks on it like soda pop. Even me when I think no one’s looking. Maybe Pete too.

Naïveté was the fuel for much of the liberal agenda at the time. Today it’s the fuel of much of the conservative agenda. It’ll come back around too. It’s ideologically agnostic. Any of us can get seduced by it. (See also: Joni Mitchell’s “The Three Great Stimulants,” one of her best songs from probably her worst album.)

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution, smile and grin at the change all around.

But if naïveté’s a drug, there’s no better detox than condescension. And that’s what’s happening here. Not in a mean way, but in the same way Southerners say “bless your heart” when they really mean “oh, do fuck off.”

You tip you hat. You mockingly bow. You flash a fake smile. You do that thing where you put two fingers up against your forehead, then flick them in the direction of someone else across the room as if to say, “I see you and note your presence with the surface message that you’re an all right kind of person.” You are not digging in the weeds, working on the actual content and motivations of the new constitution and/or revolution, which is exactly what’s needed. You’re showing a flash card.

If you really want what you think you want, if you’ve been jamming good with Weird and Gilly and Thomas More and have some restructuring ideas you’d like to present to the council, it’s going to take something more than an election to give you that kind of access. I don’t know what it is, but nobody has the stomach for it. I sure don’t.

Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday.

He’ll go back to his original plan of action, that is, which we can condescendingly (but affectionately) call “taking sanctuary in music.” It was there before the blindfolds and smoke bombs and it’ll be there long afterward. The number of kids Pete’s age who found consolation and invigoration by standing erect, shielded only by a guitar, has to be in the millions. Until they smashed it, of course. But reincarnation was less expensive then.

Then I'll get on my knees and pray we don't get fooled again.

“Good luck with that.” I have it on good authority that was on the erased part of the Nixon tapes.

The change, it had to come. We knew it all along. We were liberated from the fold, that's all.

This is the line in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” I have the most trouble deciphering. The only interpretation that makes any linear sense to me involves the onset of rock and roll and the failure of its purported emancipation. God know Pete spent a loooooooooooot of time on the subject of rock music’s motivations for both fans and artists, from the whole Quadrophenia album to “Music Must Change” to “Daily Records.”

It goes like this: Once rock and roll was let out of the box, its force was so broad and propulsive that there was no point in stopping it (“The change, it had to come”). Perry Como’s and Mitch Miller’s talents for arousing deep hunger were, shall we say, limited.

Rock culture then matured—sort of—to the point where its place in history was cemented, it stopped being a fad and became a fact of life, a certified plank in history. Based on past events like the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the invention of the printing press and Howdy Doody’s conversion to Taoism, rock’s transformation of culture was foreseeable and unavoidable (“We knew it all along”).

But upon further review, all rock did was allow a generation the option to say thanks-but-no-thanks to the space age and carve a new junior identity for their own new tribe (“We were liberated from the fold, that’s all”). Pete will still tell you rock music has massive transformative power, but it didn’t result in the spiritual overhaul of which it was possible. It just opened up new revenue streams in fashion and gadgets.

“That’s all” is the most devastating part, because it says all they really did was morph. Nothing outside the culture broth changed that much. Have a sticker.

And the world looks just the same and history ain't changed, ’cause the banners, they are flown in the next war.

Dick Clark once told Lester Bangs about a kid he knew who kept in his closet a sign with the single word “SHAME” written on it. Every time a protest sprung up in his neighborhood he’d whip it out. Must have lasted him years.

There are plenty of things that need to be changed, remade, unraveled at the root and built up again in a new image. I’m mad about them. You are too. But there’s a hermetic layer that exists over protest, a membrane, that insulates us protestors from the men (they’re all men) who spurred us on. They can see it up there. Their height over the rest of us affords them the illusion of control over us. They’ve got these scaffolds that buffer them. They know that sign says “SHAME.” They can read. (Most of them can, anyway. Literacy is no longer a requirement.) They’ll let you hold that sign. They’ll even let a few of you have guns because they know how autoerotic they can be. You just need a moment’s fulfillment, and then you’ll be hunky dory.

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.

I'll move myself and my family aside if we happen to be left half alive. I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky.

An admission of defeat, but to whom? The singer’s so enervated by the ideological white noise that he says, “You know what? Forget it. I will gladly get out of the way of the general flow of boots and checklists and run a notions shop on the coast.” “Get all my papers” could mean he’ll just read all the news that flops onto his doorstep, or it could mean he’ll sign whatever forms the new constitution requires him to fill out. I prefer the latter interpretation, because he’s also “smiling at the sky,” which reminds me of surveillance cameras at 7-Eleven’s.

Though I know that the hypnotized never lie.

For my money this is the best line in the song, because everyone is suspect to hypnotism. Especially modern cultists who have suddenly become empowered to admit to being racist like it’s lifting a fucking thirty-year load off their backs. But hypnosis via charm happens too. Under that power we all submit our deepest thoughts to our abstract caretakers like puppies. One minute you’re a hard-ass, then Tiger King gleams at you and you become Laura Ingalls Wilder. Naïveté is a great substitute for energy. Belief is a great substitute for truth.

There's nothing in the streets looks any different to me. And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye. And the parting on the left is now parting on the right.

See the Dick Clark quote above. It all gets back to Dick Clark. That’s one of the first things they teach you at Rock Critic University, along with robe-sewing and supplication.

And the beards have all grown longer overnight.

Or as Jacques Brel wrote in “Jacky”: “Même si on m'appelle Dieu le Père/Celui qui est dans l'annuaire/Entre Dieulefit et Dieu vous garde/Même si je m'laisse pousser la barbe.”

(Oh, all right, okay: As Scott Walker sang in the English translation: “My name would then be Jupiter/And I would know where I was going/And then I would become all knowing/And my beard so long and flowing.”)

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.We don't get fooled again, don't get fooled again, no, no.

After this chorus begins an extended synthesizer break. As explained by John Atkins in his critical history of The Who:

“Townshend's interest in mysticism and the relationship between sounds, vibrations and the human soul also led him to believe that the synthesizer was the tool with which to realize an accurate musical expression of a human individual—not a conscious form of music produced by playing, but a bespoke form of composition gathered from physiological and psychological data.”

Hey, that’s great. But during this section, I go back to Charlton/Jed, a couple of decades after the worst has happened.

Marnie’s gone. Karen and Wally have jobs in aerospace. Jed’s become a champion of austerity (not entirely of his own will) and sits in a living room by himself, becalmed by a device that emits low-frequency sound waves. He’s been doing this for years; he’s had nothing and has adapted his desires accordingly. He’s attained some kind of peace, he guesses. But then the flat-panel telecom screen lights up for the first time in ten years. It’s a robocall. “Hi, Jed,” a sonorous voice says over a screen of fluctuating shades of orange. “I notice you’ve been in self-imposed isolation for a while. We here at Cox Pharmaceuticals admire your fortitude and commitment. But do you ever wonder, ‘How might the trajectory of my life changed if only I had a full, rich head of hair? Might I have assembled that harem I secretly pined for? Might I have gotten that promotion at the microchip plant? Might I have understood James Joyce without having to look shit up?’ Tell me, Jed, what were your dreams?” Jed begins to answer but the response time is only three seconds long. “Those sound worthwhile. It’s time to stop dreaming and try Cox’s new FolliCool hair restorer. You’ll grow a full head of hair and, thanks to popular demand, a beard. Would you like a free one-month sample?”

“I don’t know,” Jed stutters.

“Of course you know,” the voice continues. “You really want it.”

“I have to consider it.”

“No you don’t. You just have to assent. There is no thought process behind this. It’s risk-free.”

“Risk-free?”

“Totally risk-free.”

“I… I think I might…”

“Give us your address, Jed.”

“I’m beginning to…”

“With cross-streets.”

“Why, I think I might actually want… I think….”

“Jed. Can we send this to you?”

“I think…”

“Jed. Jed. Would you like some hair? Flowing, wavy, thick, sweet strands of beautiful hair?”

“Why… I…”

“Jed! THINK! Do you want your follicles to become a symbol of life RENEWED?! The hope of REGROWTH!? Sprouts that roust the ZEPHYRS of REVOLUTION deep in the BOWELS of the SWARMING MASSES hungering for a CATALYST for just THIRTY-EIGHT DOLLARS A BOTTLE? DO YOU, JED?”

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHH!

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But a nicer cubicle.