Abstract: While 1950s rock ’n’ roll drew considerable attention for its visual dimensions, the rock groups such
as the Who that emerged in the mid-1960s pushed the style and spectacle associated with the music
into uncharted territories. One of the elements of the Who’s stage show that first gained the group
notoriety was Peter Townshend’s (born 1945) ritual smashing of his guitar. In this 1968 interview
with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, the first one he conducted for his magazine, a typically candid
Townshend explains the context of the guitar smashing on a number of levels, ranging from
serendipitous discovery to a compensation for his limited guitar skills. In earlier interviews,
Townshend had also claimed that his guitar destruction shared an affinity with the “auto-destructive”
art of Gustav Metzger, whom he had seen lecture while studying at Ealing Art School in the early
1960s.1 Regardless of where the inspiration lay, Townshend’s actions suggested a cultural shift within
rock, as it began to blur the lines between showmanship, avant-garde pop and performance art. In
the interview’s second half, Townshend addresses the importance of the working-class mod movement
to the Who’s early success. The mods’s self-fashioned rebellious stance marked a dramatic shift from
the 1950s, when the popular press routinely characterized rock ’n’ roll as a malignant force that had
simply descended upon an impressionable and passive young audience. There was rarely any
consideration that the audience itself might have a tangible influence on the music or the performers,
many of whom were teenagers themselves. The emergence of mod helped shift the dynamics of this
relationship, and in the 1970s spurred an intense academic interest in British youth subcultures that
remains one of the strongest foundations of popular music studies.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-11-27
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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