Depending on your particular level of Rock & Roll Nerdiness, you may or may not be familiar with Lifehouse. For those of you who have better things to do than read the sleeve notes of classic album reissues, Lifehouse was Pete Townshend's intended followup to Tommy. If you're still lost, Pete Townshend is the lead guitarist and primary composer of The Who. Tommy was his rock opera which is no doubt best known for the hit "Pinball Wizard" (that deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball).
Lifehouse is simultaneously Townshend's greatest success and his biggest failure. After years of work, Pete was ultimately unable to put it all together. Time ran out and nobody from the label to his bandmates could fully comprehend what he was on about. The project was abandoned, and from it's ashes were culled the collection of songs that became Who's Next- widely regarded as one of the best albums of all time and certainly The Who's most successful release by far. "Baba O'Riley" "Won't Get Fooled Again" "Bargain" "Behind Blue Eyes" all were originally part of the Lifehouse story.
For some reason, Townshend was drawn to the idea of a deaf, dumb, and blind protagonist. But since he'd already mined that territory in Tommy, he decided to change it up a little bit for his next project. Tommy was literally unable to speak, hear, or see due to trauma suffered as a young child. In the Lifehouse narrative, young people are unable to truly experience life due to willful self-imprisonment in a metaphorical gilded cage. This dystopian setting bears a striking resemblance to modern society.
In 1970 Pete Townshend envisioned the internet at least 15 years before Al Gore invented it. The song "Relay", which ultimately didn't make the cut on Who's Next, is about just that. But in 1970 nobody else in The Who or their extended circle could really grasp the concept. He envisioned a society where everyone was connected to the same wire. In the story, this was initially embraced as a great step forward for the human race but ultimately it would ensnare mankind as the world became one monolith. Hence the Who's Next album cover, which shows the band taking a piss on an actual monolith they found among some rocks somewhere.
That brings us to Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, Whatever. From the stage I see faces illuminated by their mobile devices. Endlessly scrolling eyes, killing time by reading meaningless 'bumper stickers' (as I'm wont to call them) and "liking" things. The internet has made available endless information to the world. But the problem with endless information is you can't find anything when you're looking at everything. So we've filtered it. Now we only see what's in our news feed. And what's in our news feed is mostly fake. "Likes" can now be bought.
Let's say you open a new coffee shop, or write a book or play in a band. You can hire a company in the US who will in turn hire somebody in India to fabricate Yelp reviews, come up with hashtags, and create fake Facebook accounts by the thousands to "Like" your product and get it trending. Then it pops up on Google and Facebook and bam: you're now popular.
Meanwhile, the English language has been reduced to 140 characters or less. Art is viewed in digital form on a 2 inch screen. What's Good and What's Important is determined by whoever pays Kim Kardashian enough money to tweet about it. This could easily be a less funny draft of a Louis CK bit, I realize. "The Hot Pocket Guy?" No. The Everything Is Great And No One Is Happy Guy.
Next time you go to a show, or a ballgame, or just out to a bar, try this experiment: Leave your phone in your car. Once you don't have it, you'll realize how many times per hour you compulsively reach for it. Remembering you don't have it, you'll then realize that you really had no reason to reach for it in the first place. Pretty soon your eye level will rise and you'll start to experience what's actually happening in real life. The first thing you'll notice is all the other people and their compulsive need to check their phone. You'll see folks interrupt face to face conversations with a friend or loved one every few seconds to gaze and scroll. And you'll probably take pity on these poor souls, bound to their devices, missing out on life because they're obsessed with "staying connected" at all times. But then you'll remember that you've left your phone in the car and, having not checked your messages in an hour or so, you'll convince yourself that perhaps someone has flirted with you on OKCupid so it's probably time to go retrieve it.
Or perhaps you'll cease to care what's in that little 2 inch window because the possibilities every other inch has to offer are far more enticing. And I call that a bargain, the best I ever had.
