The first in a series of my top ten favorite artists:

10. The Who.

When I was in high school, there was no better band than the Who. From the middle of my freshman year til the beginning of my senior year, it was all Who, all the time. I was obsessed. I’m sure that my lack of respect for other musicians came from my desire to emulate Pete Townshend, all hate and bile making beautiful music. There are a lot of reasons to like the Who, but when I liked them the most, I couldn’t give you a coherent reason why they are better and more culturally valuable than every other band. Usually my conversations would devolve into “but they’re just SO GOOD, fuck you!” Thank God I’m older now and figured out that writing down stuff is a better way to communicate your unbelievably biased opinion and pass it off as fact. It's also funny that at one time I would have considered them my absolute favorite band, and now I find them to be mostly cute and defiantly adolescent. It's also amusing that my shared passion for the Who with Eddie Vedder did not translate into an equal respect and love for Pearl Jam; at least until recently.

I like to think that in the end, the best thing about the Who is and was their sense of humor. What would look like self-loathing teenage poetry from almost anybody else is, in the pen of Pete Townshend, completely hilarious and totally soul-baring. “I’m a Boy” is most definitely a song about child abuse and a parents hatred of what their child has become. “Squeeze Box” is definitely not a song about a mom who likes to party and play the accordion. The songs display a duality that I always preferred to the straight forward machismo of other “hard-rock” acts like Led Zeppelin. The mark of a great song is always elusive, and almost always about something besides what it claims to be. The Who always delivered in spades. I always thought it ironic that these guys were featured at Woodstock, performing a rock opera that derides the ignorant bliss of a utopia popularized by very hippies they were performing for.

I suppose that the most blatant thing about this band was that they didn’t mind hating people. Townshend did not turn the other cheek, Daltrey was definitely not going sit silently while somebody made fun of him, Entwistle suffered no fools, and Moon didn’t give you time to be boring or trite. These were my hero’s, in music and in life. When the hypocrisy of the world pushed me into a corner, I had the Who right there. I'm sure that this absolution is what insured that my love would dwindle and that the messages of "Baba O'Reilly" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" and Quadrophenia wouldn't last. This was a band that I wanted to like more than I actually did, though ironically, I liked them a lot. It was though they made me feel like I absolutely needed to be sure that there was one true music that I could identify with. Things would change for me, but the Who did not.