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The current issue (11-2-06 - no link) of Rolling Stone is wildly anti-Conservative, with a cover that proclaims, "Time to Go!" with regard to the Republican majority in Congress. However, they did let Pete Townshend, legendary songwriter of the Who, have his say in an interview:
...The problems of generations, and the denial of our parents' generation, echoes onto the next one. I know this is the stuff of psychoanalysis, and I know we have to live in the moment, but our response to what happens in the world today is tempered and shaped by the way we were brought up to deal with trauma, spectacular attacks on our sanctity, prejudice, brutality, bullying, religious fundamentalism, all those things.
"At this time in my life, with nuclear threats coming from Iran and Korea, I am becoming so impatient with the ex-hippies all around me."And where are we today? We're in the same anti-Semitic apologetic denial - it's a dishrag of a policy. Trying to blame Israel for defending a country we created. And I'm not even Jewish! Jesus ####### Christ. And let's start with him! Sweet jesus. This album absolutely had to have several songs about Jesus the man, Muhammad the man, but not modern Christianity or Islam. They are both potentially anti-Semitic today. And I think the fact is that, when I was working on this album I just thought, "It's ####### about time that I completed my story." At this time in my life, with nuclear threats coming from Iran and Korea, I am becoming so impatient with the ex-hippies all around me. I am suddenly thinking like an extreme reactionary, right-wing, war-mongering.... ####### hell, come inside my brain! The incredible numbers of dead in the last war make it clear that we can't afford to wait to be hit again. That's my opinion. That's my story. Peace is something that has to be made. It doesn't come from passivity.
[.....]
As the album's release approaches, do you have any anxiety about how people will interpret the meaning of the new songs?
Once the song is out, I don't have a problem with people feeling whatever they're going to feel about it. You take a song like "Won't Get Fooled Again," which has been rightly fingered now as a reactionary tune written to say, "Listen, I can't cope with the counterculture. I'm twenty four years old and I've got a baby. Please don't come a-knocking on my door and say, 'The revolution is happening, Pete, and you've got to lead us.' Go away." When Roger sang it, suddenly it became almost the anthem of the counterculturalists. You say to somebody, "I'm not doing it," and they hear you say, "I'm doing it." Like, "I'm not going to tell you that I think President Bush is a bad man." And people go, "Oh, OK, so President Bush is a bad man." Let me tell you again: He ####### is not a ####### bad man, you ####### idiot.
