Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Nice Try

As much as I love Pete Townshend, I don't think he's trying to be subversive in the new Pepsi commercials featuring "My Generation" as Hendrik Hertzberg suggests:

My second reaction was a suspicion that maybe Townshend hasn't completely lost his subversive touch after all. Maybe he’s just redirected it inward. “Hope I die before I get old” (a line included in the sixty-second version) has a certain ironic, shamefaced piquancy now that the spokesmusicians for the sixties are in their sixties. That hope for a quick, Hendrix-like demise has been dashed, along with The Who’s retirement portfolio, if theirs is like everybody else's. But renting out an antique anthem of rebellion isn’t just a way to ensure that the money will be there to pay for an assisted living facility, it’s also a subtly devastating comment on where and how our g-g-generation ended up. Good one, Pete!


Um. While a good try, I don't think this is it. Pete's on record as saying that he has no problem selling his songs to fund his charitable organizations as well as giving him the freedom to create music.

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