My Generation - The Who (peaked at Number 2)

Talk about iconic! I feel like this song encapsulates teenage rebellion in much the same way that the Stones were trying to do a few weeks back with Get Off of My Cloud. Except where that song left me feeling stressed and tightly-wound, here I get the proper punch-the-air feeling that the genre's supposed to evoke. I come off My Generation and I want to stick it to the man in a way that I don't necessarily when it's the Stones complaining about parking tickets and ads on the radio. They're not doing anything hugely different. But somehow, it just comes together and scratches an itch in a way that the Stones' grumpiness didn't.

We open with some big, chunky power chords, frantic drumming underpinning it all, lots of distortion and absolutely no polish. But when the singing starts, it becomes clear that there are also a bunch of R&B influences, from the bluesy guitar licks between lines, to the hand-claps, to the call-and-response that the Who have going on as they alternate between Roger Daltrey singing about how people try to put us down, and the rest of the band replying that they're talkin' bout my generation. All of which feel like elements you'd get in a Motown song. It's just that somebody's taken all those R&B building blocks and used them to make something completely different, something much more garage-y and raw. There's almost a punk vibe to this one, it's that rough and DIY-sounding.

The punk feel isn't harmed by the lyrics, either, which represent teenaged angst in its purest form. And I respect it. Sure, it can come off a bit cliché and a bit bland almost, today, when you spout lines about how I hope I die before I get old or tell your parents don't try dig what we all say or complain about people putting teens down, just because we get around. But the cliché is a cliché for a reason, and that reason's mostly songs like this. In some ways, My Generation is out there inventing the idea that "adults just don't understand". Or codifying it for this mid-60s generation, at the very least, crystallising it into a pure, representative form.

So yeah, it's all about the attitude. Of which this song has a lot, helped in no small way by the stuttering. The why don't you just f-f-f-f-fade away line is the most obvious, here, and the one people remember. But half the lines in this begin with a pronounced stutter. Which is really weird, when you think about it, because Roger Daltrey doesn't have a stutter, nor is it or has it ever been a "cool" thing to have a stutter. I can guarantee that nobody in the 1960s was out in the schoolyard, or roaming the streets, faking a speech impediment for clout, right? And yet, here it is, in this one song. It's clearly memorable - but is that all it is, a shtick? Some have suggested that it was inspired by a John Lee Hooker song, Stuttering Blues, or by the way young Mods hopped up on amphetamines would stumble over their words. Other people have suggested it might have been a way to make lyrics fit even when they didn't quite scan, or even just an accident in the recording studio. Still others, myself included until I looked into, have just assumed that it's a way of making it sound - just for a moment - like somebody's about to drop an f-bomb. The Who have always denied that one, but I still think it's possible, or at least a happy accident. Because it feels very teenaged, pushing boundaries but with a knowing sort of smugness, provocative but just toeing the line. We all know what they really want the adults to do, so the performative stutter becomes almost like this taunt aimed at the censor board. Oh, you want to censor us for having a stutter? Ugh, the BBC are such s-s-s-s-squares!!

And this is just one of the ways that My Generation gets its teeth into you and infects you with its rebellion. Other hooks include the bass solo - something we've not really heard before, but it sound absolutely incredible - the key change in the middle - subtly concealed, but giving the whole thing a welcome shot of energy - and the feverish, slightly nasal quality to Roger's vocals, even without the stutter. Or, perhaps most strikingly, there's the whole final 30 seconds, which are just a mess of machine-gun drumming, ugly feedback, jumbled guitar and bass snippets, shouted line fragments and just this raw, grating, hard-to-parse noise. It's one of the most striking ways to end a song that we've heard yet, and it's gloriously messy and informal. It's like the Who are just done. They've reached the end of their tether, and they're going to offload all that angst and then just leave. And if you don't like that, if you want a proper resolution? Well, Roger Daltrey has a suggestion of what to go do about that, and I don't think you're going to like it very much...

1-2-3 - Len Barry (3)

My Generation is a song I knew pretty well before listening. But this next song is one I had absolutely no preconceived ideas about. Heck, I don't think I'd even heard of Len Barry before today. But it turns out that he's an American singer. A white guy, which is interesting mostly because he's singing some proper R&B here - and I don't mean the garage rock bastardisation that the Who or the Animals or the Stones are peddling. No, this is proper, Motown-style R&B, which up until now has really been the domain of black artists. But as R&B has become more of a mainstream chart phenomenon, I guess it's inevitable that we were going to see white guys like Len trying their hand at it. He's not the first or the most prominent one, mind you - he's not even the most prominent recently, I'd give that honour to the Walker Brothers, or the Righteous Brothers, even - but he's the most obvious we've had for a while. Heck, Motown apparently tried to sue Len for this song, citing similarities to the Holland-Dozier-Holland composition Ask Any Girl, which had been a hit for the Supremes a year previously. Len and his co-writers, John Medora and David White, denied any funny business, but they did then agree to grant Motown 15% of the royalties and publishing rights, and give H-D-H co-credit. So you know. Not totally beating the plagiarism accusations. And definitely not beating the accusation that Len's trying to ape the majority-black artists who've been scoring so many hits for labels like Motown.

In some ways this is concerning. There's a definite degree of unfairness to it, a sense of a system that unfairly lets white artists swoop in and profit off music that other people have had to work much harder to popularise, often eclipsing the very artists who invented the genre. Except Motown's black artists aren't really being "eclipsed" here, they're still scoring plenty of hits and making plenty of money off those plenty of hits. Artists like Len, copying them, are at most jumping on a bandwagon, joining in in a way that, where it isn't celebratory, does at least feel pretty harmless and neutrally-intentioned. He's just trying to make catchy, popular music, you know? I'm not denying that there's a critique to be made, still. But it's more nuanced than just "white people should stick to making white music" (whatever that would even be!)

I think it helps that this is just good, cool music. The first time I listened, I thought it was kind of cheesy. But the more I've listened - and I've listened on repeat a few times now - the more I've found myself falling for Len. Everything about this, the slinky bassline, the horns cutting heroically through, the mellower vibes and sax, the suspended chords throughout, the way the drums ramp up going into the chorus, even just Len's laid back, soulful delivery, it's all very likable to me, very endearing. It's warm and romantic, with these predictable but still rather lovely chord progressions. And the lyrics are predictable too, but they're cute and solidly written, still. 1, 2, 3, Len sings, that's how elementary / It's gonna be / Come on, let's fall in love / It's easy / Like takin' candy / From a baby. Love isn't hard at all, Len expands. No, the hard part is living without love / Without your love, baby, I would die. See what I mean? Cute and very commercial. I am not immune to a well made bit of pop.

Positively 4th Street - Bob Dylan (8)

And finally, we wrap with a Bob Dylan song that I don't know at all. This is maybe a first? I feel like everything else that he's done I have at least vaguely been aware of. But this one's an unknown to me. On first listen, it feels most like Like a Rolling Stone, down to the descending Hammond organ riff over the introduction, and the general bitterness. Because this, again, is Bob in his meaner, more personal mode, using his podium as a songwriter to criticise a mysterious addressee for all their many faults without ever really identifying them, a 60s version of modern popstars vagueposting and taking passive-aggressive lyrical swipes at people. It's giving Taylor Swift back in her "beef with everybody" era, just in terms of how irritating I find it.

What I will say, to Bob's credit, is that he's at least specific. By the end of this song, I have no clue who he's mad at, but I at least understand exactly what his problem with them is. Or his problems, plural, because there's a whole itemised list. Say what you like about Bob, he's thorough. You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend, he starts with, pointing out that when I was down, you just stood there grinning. They say now that they want to help him, but you just want to be on the side that's winning. They then turned round and accused him of letting them down, it seems, claiming to be hurt, and to have lost faith in him, except you had no faith to lose, and you know it. They talk smack about Bob behind his back, then fake small talk when they bump into him in public, when you know, as well as me, you'd rather see my paralyzed. They're dissatisfied and (implicitly) resentful of Bob's success. And then, he does well to end on the most savage line, telling them that he wishes he could be in their shoes, and that they could be in his. Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes / You'd know what a drag it is to see you. Which, like, wow. Brutal truth bomb. You tell 'em, Bob.

Typed out like that, when I focus in on details, I do kind of enjoy how catty and mean this one is, and how straightforward it is. I like picking Bob's more poetic lyrics apart, but there's something satisfying, in a diss track that just lays it all out, Bob revelling in acting like the petty bitch he is. Except then I zoom out and, like... I dunno. Was the whole thing needed? It's fun, but it says precisely nothing, especially since we have no clue what or who it's really about. It just feels like Bob pulling his personal drama out and putting it in the spotlight for attention, playing the victim and complaining about how hard it is to be Bob freakin' Dylan. Oh, woe is me, everybody's so jealous of my success. That's especially the case if, as some have suggested, the 4th Street of the title is New York's 4th Street, the centre of Greenwich Village and the folk scene it was associated with. It's the slimmest of interpretative threads, but if true, then the song basically turns into a bunch of cheap shots at smaller, less successful artists. Which looks a heck of a lot like Bob punching down, at this point. Mean, and unnecessary.

Two out of three of these songs did actually land on my liked songs playlist, or were there already, in the Who's case (and rightfully so). Bob was the only miss, for me, this week. And I think part of that is just my general distaste for celebrity feuds and diss tracks. They're fun for a moment. But in the grand scheme of things, bitterness is rarely attractive. Give me fun romance any day - or even better, teenage rebellion and barely-concealed swearing.