Happy 45th Anniversary to The Who’s eighth studio album Who Are You, originally released August 18, 1978.
Every album by The Who has two things. The first is a concept, whether it’s “Contrary to previous statements, we’re now old” (2020’s WHO) or “Growing up is devastatingly lonely” (1973’s Quadrophenia). Second, they all have some commentary on the State Of Rock Music, either its demise or its redemptive properties. While Who Are You (1978) is rarely considered a classic of the band’s repertoire, it’s a quintessential overlap of these Whoisms. While Tommy (1969) spoke to the restorative power of rock & roll at the end of the sixties, Who Are You speaks to the dissolution of those ideals at the end of the seventies and their run as a four-piece. It’s a lighter, groovier, piece of grief in two dimensions.
The Who By Numbers (1975) was a creative pivot for the band, turning to a more introspective songwriting mode as Pete Townshend got disillusioned with his life as a rock star. But unlike The Who By Numbers, Who Are You places the blame at the feet of rock music, rather than the artist. It’s not subtle; on the opening track “New Song,” Townshend writes “the same old song with a few new lines / and everybody wants to cheer it.” (If Townshend, one of the great innovators in rock music, feels like he’s spinning his wheels, we know we’re in trouble.) “Sister Disco,” an absolute banger, mourns popular music’s supposed turn toward the vapid. Townshend had put his faith in popular music to lift up hearts and minds, and this is the record where he realized it wasn’t working.
Of course, The Who themselves were signs of rock’s mortality. By the time Who Are You came out, The Beatles had broken up eight years earlier, the Rolling Stones had lost Brian Jones nearly a decade earlier, and The Kinks had been a revolving door for years. As the British Invasion slowly collapsed, The Who persevered. But 1978 was the stopping point; Keith Moon would die less than a month after Who Are You’s release.
Moon’s condition fundamentally restructures the record’s sound. On “Had Enough” and “Trick of the Light,” he’s in a surprising lock-step, playing actual drum grooves instead of the structured calamities that we’re used to. The nadir is “The Music Must Change,” as Moon could not handle the 6/8 time signature, leading drums to be scratched from the track altogether. The overall sound is less Who-like, making the record lighter and more spacious than any of the band’s other efforts. As Townshend was writing about the death of rock music, his own band had seemingly played its last notes as the ensemble we once knew them as.
Alongside this change in the sound’s foundation, Who Are You takes on a more synthesizer-heavy sound than ever. While the synthesizer had been part of The Who’s sound since Who’s Next (1971), it had not been used as subtly as it had been on Who Are You. On this record, it is treated as another instrument in the band, not the kind of thing the band has to let stand on its own (as in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “Baba O’Riley.”) Even Entwistle’s lone songwriting contribution, a delightful tune about a robot called “905,” has the power trio sound supplemented with a healthy amount of futuristic backing noise. With Moon on the outs and the synthesizer filling in the gaps, the sound of The Who was forever changed.
Listen to the Album:
Entwistle and Daltrey, for their parts, are still masters of their instruments. Entwistle’s lightning-fast fills on “Sister Disco” are matched in sophistication only by the lyrical counterpoint he offers in the song’s slow sections. Daltrey’s versatility remains his great strength, as he belts out a ballad in “Love Is Coming Down” and leans into a rock & roll growl on “Trick of the Light.”
“Love Is Coming Down,” the second-to-last track on the record, ends with a final plaintive verse: “I’m not a loser, but did I really win? / I’m looking forward to doing it all again.” Entwistle’s bass part slides upward, as if asking a question. Townshend has spent the whole record mourning rock & roll, as the sound of his band collapsed around him. And, then, as if by divine intervention, guitar and synthesizer kick in for one last song: “Who Are You.”
The title track truly is The Who’s last gasp, a masterclass in the complex song structures that defined Who’s Next, the introspection of The Who By Numbers, and the ass-kicking instrumental of Quadrophenia. Every band member is at the height of their powers, pulling no punches. The versespositively drip with rage while the backing-vocal driven chorus pulls us back to the band’s R&B era. The instrumental breakdown is Townshend at his best, stringing together disparate elements like he did on Tommy and Quadrophenia to create wholly new textures that are both alien to, and the lifeblood of, the song. The song is The Who’s dying breath, and they went doing what they did best: a desperate attempt to show the awesome power of rock & roll.
Listen: