Subject: Pete
From: Malcolm Lawrence (Malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Date: Sat Feb 22 1997 - 19:12:11 GMT
Hello all. I found this online a few days ago, it's from the History of Rock and Roll, which I missed when it was on TV, but I keep thinking about this in regards to it's comments on generations and suicide. Anyway, I thought I'd share it in light of the recent thread about Seymour's suicide.
Malcolm
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http://www.hollywood.com/rocknroll/quote/town.html
QUESTION: Pete, tell us if you would, because it's something we really need said and you say it so well. Is rock reinventing itself?
PETE TOWNSHEND: I think maybe the most interesting view to look at is the one that we've just passed through: Grunge...which has been an obvious harping back to an earlier style of rock. Not just about the sound of the bands, but what it means to the people that are listening to the music and the significance of Kurt Cobain's death. You start to get a sense...what actually happens is not that Rock 'n' Roll reinvents itself, but that human beings don't have very many ideas and they tend to do the same thing over and over again, behaviorally. Individuals will always make the same series of mistakes again and again and again. The day I die, my parting words will be, "Please God, in my next life, will I not do that every day of my life?" We all get caught by the same problems. Since the second World War, certainly in America and in Europe, you've seen groups of people form themselves into generations. That's a big mistake. That's wrong. And that's why Kurt Cobain is dead. But then there's people that think, "Ah, we've learned from this." But they haven't. They've not experienced anything. The people that have learned the lesson of Kurt Cobain's death are really just a handful of people that are very close to him. His wife, his poor little kid who's going to grow up in the spotlight without a father, and the other guys in the band. Look at my generation. How did that
work? Jimi Hendrix. Brian Jones. Janis Joplin. Keith Moon. The list is fucking endless. They're dead people. My life is full of dead people. My friends are dead. My friends. They might be your fucking icons. They're my fucking friends. They're dead. Dead people in my life. Lots of them. People that I knew, fucked, loved, played with, grew up with. Now, we have Generation X which is responding to this big significant moment, which is Kurt Cobain committing suicide, and I just think this shouldn't happen again. It will happen again, but it shouldn't. In the 60s, we really thought that we were changing the world and we didn't. When we got college degrees and jobs and became lawyers and politicians, then we started to change the world. If you want to change the world, you have to get out there and change it. Music is not going to change it. Music changes the way you live in the world. It changes the way you see it. But it doesn't change the world itself.
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