Melody Maker review of AQO/WSO

[jgg@iac.net (Joseph Grimes)]

Hi all.

I'm posting this review from the British music weekly Melody Maker because
I think it's pretty rare.  They usually slam anything by Boring Old Farts,
but here they give both A Quick One and Sell Out their "Bloody Essential"
rating.  The reviewer does slip a little at the end though.
----------------------------

The Who are a strange one:  among the most legendary rock groups ever, they
had, until last year's Mod revival, probably fallen from favour more
spectacularly than any other group in pop history.

The reason for this is quite simple.  Thanks to Pete Townshend's unwavering
populist aesthetic (in 1965, he told Melody Maker that his favourite kind
of music was "anything currently recognized as being liked"), The Who's
20-year career ran absolutely parallel to pop's rise and fall:  from
mid-Sixties optimism, through psychedelic-era portentious/pretentiousness
and Seventies disillusionment, right up to the moribund mawkishness of the
mid-Eighties, The Who soundtracked Their Generation's ups and downs with
bang-on accuracy throughout.

Thus, those of us young enough to see the Woodstock generation for what
they are (a bunch of whingeing failures, basically) find Townshend's
descent from pop prophet to washed-up rock apologist particularly
nauseating (though there's actually something compelling about the
apocalyptic self-pity of 1975's millionaire whingefest "The Who By
Numbers").

But that's why these two albums sound so contemporary:  they date from 1966
and 1967, respectively, the period post-"My Generation", pre-"Tommy", a
time of optimism and uncertainty, everyone terribly excited about pop, no
one quite sure where to take it--much like today.  "A Quick One" is,
essentially, throwaway stoned whimsy (containing as it does the eternally
excremental "Boris The Spider").  But "The Who Sell Out" still sounds like
A MASTERPIECE.

A glorious celebration of pop as useless commodity and a
commercially-corrupted art form (hackneyed now, but visionary back then),
it pushes pop's essential brashness, bravado and bad taste to preposterous
extremes, and, in the process, makes them holy.  Alternating songs of
adolescent trauma, spiritual bankruptcy and drug-assisted flight from
convention with the band's reconstructions of adverts for acne creams and
Heinz beans, it crosses art-school intelligence with pop flash with neither
being cheapened or degraded, and is, as such, a stupendous achievement.

That, just two years later, Townshend could have come up with "Tommy", the
epitome of everything--phoniness, pomposity, pop masquerading as capital
"A" ART--that "Sell Out" debunks with such incisive, effortless glee, is
unfathomable.

TAYLOR PARKES
7/22/95
_________________________________

Can't win 'em all, I guess.
Rereading this review, it looks like there are as many negative as positive
comments.

And yes, they spell "whine" "whinge".