Formed in London in 1964, The Who consisted of the extraordinary talents of Roger Daltrey (vocals), Pete Townshend (guitar), John Entwistle (bass), and Keith Moon (drums).
The band's music was a fusion of powerful rock, experimental elements, and emotive storytelling. Hits like "My Generation," "Baba O'Riley," and "Pinball Wizard" resonated with fans across generations, defining a new era of rock music. Pete Townshend's distinctive windmill guitar style and Daltrey's raw vocals became The Who's signature sound.
Their conceptual rock opera albums, most notably "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia," showcased their artistic depth and ambition, breaking new ground in the realm of album-oriented rock. The band's music often delved into themes of rebellion, teenage angst, and the search for identity, speaking to a generation hungry for change and self-expression.
Their chemistry and dynamic stage presence set them apart from their peers, captivating audiences with their electrifying live shows, which included a trademark tradition: smashing instruments.
According to guitarist Pete Townshend, his first public act of destruction happened by accident: He was performing at London’s Railway Club in 1964 when he unwittingly cracked his guitar’s headstock when it hit the venue’s low ceiling. “I was expecting everybody to go, ‘Wow he’s broken his guitar’,” he told Rolling Stone in 1968, “but nobody did anything, which made me kind of angry in a way, and determined to get this precious event noticed by the audience.” So he went about obliterating the rest of the instrument in a more theatrical fashion, much to the crowd’s delight. In time, they would eventually overdo it, using explosives and almost going deaf in the process. You gotta love the 60s.
And so one of rock’s most glorious and ridiculous rituals was born, one that’s been inherited by successive generations of musicians with attitude and guitars to spare. Sure, it’s a ritual that’s fallen out of fashion as guitar rock’s cultural traits have morphed, while the current economic realities of music-making mean that even popular bands can’t afford to sacrifice their gear for the sake of extravaganza. But whether you see it as a form of performance art or just a wasteful display of rich rockstar excess, there’s something inherently interesting about watching a musician destroy the thing they love the most. Oscar Wilde wrote:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Destroying things we love is not something we only did in the tumultuous sixties.
Human sacrifice was practiced by many ancient cultures. People and animals would be ritually killed in a manner that was supposed to please or appease a god or spirit.
Occurrences of human sacrifice have been found in multiple cultures on multiple continents. This included the sacrifice of people upon the death of a king, or in times of natural disaster. Droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. were seen as a sign of anger or displeasure by deities, and sacrifices were supposed to lessen the divine ire.
As we have—in general—become less barbaric, we don’t usually go around killing living beings to offer them to The Gods after a storm. Still, in our modern, more civilized societies of today, we do our bit of guitar smashing. We still put our figurative goats on the sacrifice table. As per Wilde’s words: yet we kill the things we love. Why so?
Incredibly, the asymmetry between construction and destruction is not always appreciated enough. Building entails creating order out of chaos and it takes energy, time and effort. Bringing the entropy down is so underrated. Destroying takes comparatively no energy, as it produces a quasi random, useless outcome with a single blow. Building a guitar takes weeks, smashing it to pieces can take what; 2, 3 minutes? An adult goat can take 15 years to grow; slitting its throat to make an immaterial deity of dubious existence less angry can take a few seconds. Forming a jelled team may take a decade; dismembering it in the name of slippery metrics takes one powerpoint presentation between two clueless managers sitting in a distant meeting room.
Perhaps the most perplexing self-destructive act takes place when the perpetrator has been part of the building process of the thing being destroyed. Pete Townshend did not design or build his own guitars, so he was in fact destroying someone else’s work. But having a clear notion on how much effort and energy something took to be made, knowing the intricacies of its inner mechanisms, the subtleties, the pains, the hills that had to be climbed, should play a part in the executioner’s mind while wielding the guillotine. Why is it that in many cases it doesn’t?
First, goddamn egos. Some people will sell their mother should their egos be massaged the right way. Offer someone a position of power and a fancy title but first ask them to incinerate with a flamethrower all the work they have done in the past decade to pay loyalty to a “deity” (read, those in power) and many will, feeling no remorse about it. Build, get promoted, destroy, move on.
But also, the pervasive “illusion of improvement”. With more power, and while thinking they are building “bigger, stronger, more efficient”, in fact they are unwittingly obliterating the thing it took so long to bring on its feet. Power often stupefies otherwise smart people and atrophy their judgment. A good soldier in the trenches can make a terrible general in the war room; being good at tactics doesn’t make you good at strategy. And by the time they realize they have destroyed something once decent, they are too far to be affected by the fecal shrapnel, perhaps one or two promotions away from having to fix it. At the end of the day, we all have our internal, private agendas we must content.
If Oscar Wilde lived today and worked as a software developer in some bureaucratic organization somewhere, he would have said instead:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
Some do it with a half-baked decision,
Some for a flattering promotion,
The coward does it with a powerpoint,
The brave man with a new org chart!