Camille Paglia on The Who

[Brian Cady <cadyb@home.com>]

Camille Paglia, that feminist gadfly, contrasted The Sex Pistols with The Who
and
The Rolling Stones in the most recent issue of the internet magazine Salon.  You 
can read the entire piece at: 

http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/

Here's the part about The Who:

"The Sex Pistols undoubtedly struck many young listeners as highly original, but 
in the late 1970s I was already 30 and had gotten my punk zap from the Velvet 
Underground, whose mesmerizing first album was released in 1967, when I was in 
college. In their first phase (the early- to mid-1960s), the Rolling Stones and 
the Who had also been aggressively punk in assumptions and attitude.

"Punk anarchism may be an adolescent phase of simplistic rebellion against
authority. 
The Rolling Stones’ canonical late-1960s songs, "Sympathy for the Devil,"
"Jumpin’ 
Jack Flash," "Street Fighting Man" and "Gimme Shelter," are far more
comprehensive 
statements about life and its inevitable conflicts between individualism and
order. 
The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, who died of a drug overdose in 1979 several months 
after he was charged with murdering his girlfriend, didn’t live long enough to
work 
through his early punk positions. 

"I would cite the Who’s magnificent, rumbling "Eminence Front" (from the 1982
"It’s 
Hard" album), with its penetrating insights into psychology and politics, as an
example 
of what an evolved punk can and should achieve. Anarchism is glorified
thumb-sucking. 
Off with the diapers, and on to business! Construction, not destruction, is the
name 
of the human game."

			-Brian in Atlanta