[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On AmericanStudies
lessons and limits from an English classic rock anthem.
In one
of my early posts, nearly 14 years ago, I wrote about the Australian rock
band Midnight Oil (whose excellent latest album I included in this much
more recent post), and the limits but also and especially the possibilities
of the transnational turn in AmericanStudies. Since I’m writing about a song by
another rock group from outside of the US, England’s The Who, in today’s post, I’d
ask you to check out that prior one (the first hyperlink above), and then come
on back for some thoughts on that transnational band and one of their biggest
hits.
Welcome
back! The Who’s “Won’t
Get Fooled Again” (1971) is very much a product of its early 1970s moment,
and specifically of a rising sense of pessimism and even cynicism about the
prior decade’s social movements and efforts to change the world. That tone is
present throughout the song, but most especially in the chorus: “I’ll tip my
hat to the new Constitution/Take a bow for the new revolution/Smile and grin at
the change all around/Pick up my guitar and play/Just like yesterday/Then I’ll
get on my knees and pray/We don’t get fooled again.” A lot has been written
about how Watergate
contributed to an erosion of trust and shift away from 1960s idealism in the
early to mid-1970s, but this song (featured on the album Who’s Next)
came out nearly two years before that scandal began to break, and despite its
English origins I have to think it can be contextualized in similar perspectives
in the US as well. The transition between decades is never a singular nor
linear one, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of demarcation, and
I’d say this Who song can help us identify one between the 60s and 70s.
At the
same time, it’s fair to say that a bunch of English white men aren’t going to
be the best judges of what did and didn’t take place for disadvantaged American
communities, and I think this Who song also features some less apt moments
along those lines. For example, there’s the second verse: “A change, it had to
come/We knew it all along/We were liberated from the fold, that’s all/And the
world looks just the same/And history ain’t changed/’Cause the banners, they were
all flown in the last war.” Maybe that last line is an anti-Vietnam War
sentiment, in which case fair enough on that score, but when it comes to
American domestic history I think it’s impossible to argue that the world
looked just the same after 1960s changes like (for example) the Civil Rights
Movement, the women’s movement, the Great Society programs, and more. I’m not a
historian of England, and maybe less had really changed across the pond during
this turbulent decade; but here in the US, I think it’d be foolish to suggest
that “history ain’t changed” over that time.
Next
foolish text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?
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