Pete Townshend comments on Won't Get Fooled Again being named the all time greatest "conservative" rock song:
... the song has no party-allied political message at all. It is not precisely a song that decries revolution - it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets - but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.
Two thoughts: Revolution and conservatism are not necessarily inconsistent. From one perspective, for example, the American Revolution was a deeply conservative act - an attempt by the colonists to conserve what they understood to be the ancient rights of Englishmen from Parliamentary tyranny. Second, is not the law of unintended consequences, at the heart of the conservative worldview?
Further, Townshend opines:
The song was meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause. ... What I write is interpreted, first of all by Roger Daltrey. Won't Get Fooled Again - then - was a song that pleaded '….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….'. But when Roger Daltrey screamed as though his heart was being torn out in the closing moments of the song, it became something more to so many people. And I must live with that.
As for the political implications, note (1) the emphasis on there being an aspect of life which is not for sale, which echoes Edmund Burke's references to "the unbought grace of life," and (2) the desire to be left alone by both politicians and revolutionaries, so as to work for change individually, which echoes Burke's references to the "little platoons" of society, of which the family is first and foremost. As Ann Althouse thus correctly observes: "A lot of conservatives will say that's precisely what is conservative."
Finally, isn't this a fascinating insight into the complex relationship between Townshend and Daltrey? (For his own part, Daltrey has said that "Nothing ... challenges him like a Townshend song. Everything else, even the acting career, is 'secondary'.") The act of performance creates an entirely new work of art, whose meaning may be entirely different than that intended by the author/composer. Like revolution, performance thus "can have results we cannot predict."
Anyway, regardless of Townshend's, Daltrey's, or the song's politics, Won't Get Fooled Again stands as one of the great rock anthems of all time and, like all great works of art, is subject to appropriation and reinterpretation by those who hear (or view or read it).
