Line #19 YMMV/TheWho


1	----
2	* AccidentalInnuendo: Pete Townshend has said that "Squeeze Box" is about nothing more than a woman who plays accordion to the annoyance of her family. But John Entwistle said that when he first heard the song, he knew "it was about tits." According to [[http://www.thewho.net/linernotes/ByNumbers.htm this]], however, "[Squeeze Box was] Intended as a poorly aimed dirty joke."
3	* AlternateAesopInterpretation: Proposed by Pete himself: the message of "Won't Get Fooled Again" is essentially "Revolution is futile because the person in charge will always make it harder for everyone below them," but he's proposed that a more positive way of looking at it is "Don't even bother listening to the boss. You control your own destiny."
4	* AluminumChristmasTrees: The band recorded some real commercials around the time ''Music/TheWhoSellOut'' was recorded. Some of them are featured on the 1995 reissue alongside the fictional ones made for the album.
5	* ArchivePanic: A career spanning over 50 years and different versions of each album, plus many non-albums singles, live albums and rarities/demos/outtakes etc. have lead to this. But fear not! Multiple guidebooks exist with overviews of all of their music.
6	* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: The end of "I Believe in Everything" from Entwistle's first solo album suddenly breaks into the whole band (including an incredibly drunk-sounding Keith Moon) singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"
7	* BrokenBase:
8	** The disputes over whether the band should have quit after Moon's death have been...energetic, especially with Kenney Jones and the 1989 Tommy tour. It got better (mostly) after Zak Starkey became the drummer.
9	** There is disagreement within the fanbase as to whether the band's 70s material or its 60s material is superior.
10	** The quality of the 1995 remixes, which are the main commercially available single-CD versions of the band's albums. Some feel that the remixes are an audible improvement, while others think that they are sloppy and deviate too much from the originals. The one remix that everybody seems to like, however, is ''The Who Sell Out,'' which adds the previously missing second verse to "Rael" (thereby removing the jarring edit present on all other versions of the song), as well as a selection of truly essential bonus tracks which are sequenced along with various advertisement outtakes to complement the spirit of the original album.
11	* CoveredUp: They are often the coverers though: "Young Man Blues" (Mose Allison), "Eyesight to the Blind" (Sonny Boy Williamson II), "Summertime Blues" (Music/EddieCochran), "Leaving Here" (Eddie Holland, Jr.), "Baby Don't You Do It" (Music/MarvinGaye).
12	* CrazyIsCool: Keith Moon. According to Music/AliceCooper, only a fraction of the rumors about rockers like Ozzy, Iggy Pop, and Alice Cooper are actually true. ''All'' the stories about Keith Moon are true... and you've only heard a '''fraction''' of them.
13	** Not just Moon either - their appearance on the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q63XogYTIcc Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour]], and their reaction to Tommy Smothers' teasing, as well as smashing his (unstrung) acoustic guitar after the bigger-than-planned explosion. A lot of that was scripted, though the big explosion certainly wasn't. Tommy was a big fan of the Who, and decided to have them on after he saw them at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Moon had a knack for going off-script.
14	*** In fact, Roger is on record saying that the other three members genuinely thought that he was {{troll}}ing them about being dead, expecting him to pop out of his coffin at the funeral and laugh at how he fooled everyone!
15	* EpicRiff:
16	** "My Generation", "Baba O'Riley", "I'm Free"...
17	** "Won't Get Fooled Again" contains an epic synthesizer riff. Actually, a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ run through an [=EMS VCS3=] synthesizer.
18	* EnsembleDarkhorse: John Entwistle, who would stand as still as a statue onstage while tossing out mind-bending bass parts as though they were nothing. His songs, particularly "Boris the Spider" and "My Wife," are beloved by the fandom, and his harmonies were integral to the band's sound, as he was the only member who could sing both very low ("Boris," "Summertime Blues") and very high ("A Quick One, While He's Away").
19	* FandomEnragingMisconception: Don't call into a classic rock station and request [[RefrainFromAssuming "The Who's Teenage Wasteland"]]. Not only will they not play it, but they may come to your house and work you over. [[NonAppearingTitle The title is "Baba O'Riley."]]
20	* FandomRivalry: With Music/LedZeppelin. This generally boils down to which individual members were the "Greatest of All Time" on their respective instruments. Other issues include which band was more influential and who was truly the best live. It probably stems from Keith Moon and John Entwistle declining Jimmy Page in recreating Music/TheYardbirds as a supergroup before Led Zeppelin was even around. It should be noted though that this rivalry isn't as present in the bands' native United Kingdom, where Led Zeppelin is seen as just another rock band, while the Who are if anything more beloved because Townshend's lyrics often explicitly dealt with aspects of British life (in fact, their early work was a major influence on Britpop).
21	* FanNickname: Some band member nicknames are sometimes used by the group as well (usually onstage).
22	** John Entwistle: The Ox, Thunderfingers, The Eye of the Hurricane.
23	** Moon: Moonie, Moon the Loon.
24	** The 1989 ''Music/{{Tommy}}'' anniversary tour: "The Who on Ice".
25	** The 1975 album ''The Who by Numbers'': "Pete Townshend's suicide note".
26	* FanonDiscontinuity: Most fans agree that the band ceased to exist after ''Who Are You'', the last album with Keith Moon.
27	* GrowingTheBeard:
28	** ''Tommy''. Prior to this, The Who had been a fairly run-of-the-mill pop band, with their best songs being mostly non-album singles. After ''Tommy'', they became rock legends.
29	** Their live performances became this between '67 and '68.
30	* HarsherInHindsight:
31	** The cover for ''Who Are You'' has a photo of the band with Keith Moon sitting in a chair with the words "Not to be taken away" on the back. Sadly, he died of a drug overdose one month after the album was released. (The reason he was sitting on the chair in the first place was to hide his noticeable weight gain.)
32	** The line "Hope I die before I get old," in "My Generation", after the deaths of Keith Moon and John Entwistle. In another FlipFlopOfGod, Townshend took in TheNineties to claiming that "oldness" is a state of mind, not a descriptor of physical age.
33	** "A Quick One, While He's Away" is this for Pete Townshend. He initially wrote it on a whim as a light-hearted story about affairs and a love triangle. But years later, he started seeing it as a metaphor for the sexual abuse and other bad experiences he suffered while living with this grandmother as a child. In his autobiography, he claims that he might have subconsciously written the song as a way to cope. They retired the song from their concerts for many years until TheNewTens, when they began include more deep cuts.
34	* SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments:
35	** When Pete and Roger were honored by the Kennedy Center in 2008, the video montage placed emphasis on their reuniting to support the police, firefighters, and soldiers who volunteered in the aftermath of 9/11. Later on, during Rob Thomas' performance of "Baba O'Riley," the stage opened up to reveal hundreds of firefighters and policemen/women, singing along (and fist-pumping) to the "teenage wasteland" section. The two were pretty moved; after all the performances, Roger and Pete simply looked at each other and shook hands. They'd done alright, it seemed.
36	** "Real Good Looking Boy", full stop, especially the final chorus.
37	** For all of his antics, Keith was genuinely kind to a young kid at the Rainbow in Los Angeles. That kid? [[Music/RedHotChiliPeppers Anthony Kiedis]].
38	* HilariousInHindsight:
39	** The commercials on ''The Who Sell Out'', since the band's music has been featured in several real ones, as well as ''Series/{{CSI}}''.
40	** The line "I look pretty young but I'm just back-dated" in "Substitute", given that Roger Daltrey has [[OlderThanTheyLook aged surprisingly well]].
41	** Similarly, "I hope I die before I get old". Crossing into the {{harsher\|InHindsight}} side of the trope, only Keith Moon fulfilled that "promise".
42	* JerkassWoobie: The narrator of "Behind Blue Eyes."
43	-->"No one knows what it's like, to be the bad man..."
44	* MemeticMutation:
45	** A QuipToBlack in the ''CSI'' style, followed by "YEEAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" from "Won't Get Fooled Again".
46	** "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" from the same song. Used to criticise every politician in office, ever.
47	** "Baba O'Reilly" for parody imaginings of InMediasRes HowWeGotHere story intros, coming with a RecordNeedleScratch and a freeze frame. Though a DeadUnicornTrope with no unironic examples containing those components, it's still a popular reference.
48	* MorePopularReplacement: Keith Moon, compared to their previous drummer Doug Sandom.
49	* OnceOriginalNowCommon:
50	** "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" were among the first rock songs to feature synthesized patterns. Now it's common in every pop song.
51	** ''Tommy'' often gets this treatment now that its revolutionary factor has worn off. Many fans see the production as being rather thin and the songs lacking compared to those on ''Who's Next'' and ''Quadrophenia''.
52	** ''The Who Sell Out'': The idea of rock stars shilling for various products isn't as nearly as funny now as it was in 1967, since everybody does it nowadays.
53	** Their tendency to [[RockersSmashGuitars wreck their instruments onstage]] was radical and even subversive in 1964. It's become almost a cliché now.
54	* OvershadowedByControversy: While they have managed to eventually escape their association with the tragedy by the start of the new millennium, the band, for nearly two decades, was primarily associated with the 1979 disaster at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, in which 11 of their fans died in a crowd surge outside the arena before the concert. While at first the MoralGuardians put the band under scrutiny for the incident, later investigations established that the poorly-regulated use of "festival seating", bad information directed at concertgoers (leading to a huge crowd showing up several hours before the show) and bad crowd management (only one set of doors to the arena was open, creating a bottleneck) led to the tragedy. The Who themselves made a return appearance in Cincinnati in 2022, with several memorials to the victims during the show.
55	* RefrainFromAssuming: It's "Baba O'Riley", '''not''' "Teenage Wasteland". However, there is a Pete Townshend version of the song with a slower tempo called "Teenage Wasteland", making it easy to mistake. The song "Teenage Wasteland" has two verses, a bridge, and a second chorus section that were cut out when the song became "Baba O'Riley".
56	* ReplacementScrappy: Kenney Jones was seen as this when he followed the late Keith Moon, not only because Moon left such big shoes to fill, but also because Jones's drumming was far more reserved than Moon's famously anarchistic style, which many fans felt dampened their edge. Daltrey himself commented that while Jones was an excellent drummer with the Small Faces and the Faces, his style was simply wrong for the Who.
57	* SeasonalRot: Many fans consider everything the band did after Keith Moon's death to be of much lesser quality. Consensus only grows by the time of John Entwistle's death in 2002.
58	* SequelDisplacement: Despite the title track being one of their best known singles, ''Music/MyGeneration'' was out of print in the UK for decades, and prior to 2005 only an altered U.S. release, ''The Who Sing My Generation,'' was available on CD. This has recently been rectified with the release of several deluxe edition packages of the original UK album.
59	* SignatureSong: "Baba O' Riley", "My Generation", "Behind Blue Eyes", "Who Are You", "Pinball Wizard" and "Won't Get Fooled Again".
60	* SoBadItsGood: Keith Moon released exactly one album, called ''Two Sides of the Moon'', and it consisted largely of crooning covers of Music/TheBeachBoys and Music/TheBeatles songs, and one song where Keith and Music/RingoStarr were just telling corny old vaudeville jokes back and forth over some music. Bless his heart, he wasn't any good at singing, but he was just so enthusiastic and just so obviously enjoying himself that it's infectious.
61	* SophomoreSlump: ''Music/AQuickOne,'' from 1966, is pretty much universally regarded by the fanbase as being this, lacking both the raw power and live-in-the-studio feel of ''Music/MyGeneration'' and the clever concept and psych-rock sheen of ''Music/TheWhoSellOut.'' Additionally, it was the only album on which each member contributed songs, a practice that was quickly abandoned when it became clear that the writing skills of Moon and Daltrey weren't up to par. It doesn't help that the most readily available release of the album features an odd blend of songs in mono, stereo, and crude "fake stereo" (made by panning the bass frequencies of the mono mix to one side of the stereo image and the treble frequencies to the other).
62	* StuckInTheirShadow:
63	** Despite being the lead singer, Roger Daltrey was the least distinctive member in the eyes of fans during the band's early years. However, once he grew his hair out and found his voice circa 1970, he was able to escape from his bandmates' shadows.
64	** Despite being regarded by many as the greatest bass player of all time, and certainly a lot better-known than the bassists of most famous bands, John Entwistle is still nowhere near as famous as Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey or Keith Moon.
65	* TheyChangedItNowItSucks: So very, very much with ''Live at Leeds''. Many see the whole point of the album as showing the Who in their raw, live form as the original LP did. The 1995 and 2001 re-releases gave us the whole concert, but with crackling noises removed, some of the vocals re-recorded, and on the 2001 version, the ''Tommy'' section moved to a separate disc.
66	** The 1995 remixes have gotten this reaction from some fans (see BrokenBase).
67	* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: "Magic Bus" manages to still sound reasonably timeless until it betrays the fact that it was written [[UsefulNotes/OldBritishMoney before British currency was decimalised]] with "Thruppence and sixpence every day just to drive to my baby".
68	* ValuesDissonance: "Going Mobile" contains the word "gypsy", which is generally considered a slur today.
69	* ValuesResonance: "I'm a Boy," about a male child whose mother insists on treating him as a girl and dressing him in feminine clothes, seemed like an outlandish premise at the time of the song's release. However, today it can resonate strongly with trans kids whose parents refuse to recognize their gender identity.
70	* TheWoobie: Tommy from the eponymous album. First he's rendered deaf, dumb and blind after he witnesses a murder as a young child. Then he gets tortured by his cousin. Then he's given tons of drugs by the "Acid Queen", then gets molested by his Uncle Ernie. Eventually his sight, voice, and hearing are restored, and he becomes a Messiah figure to the fans he gained playing pinball. His followers turn on him shortly after.

Context YMMV / TheWho