The Bad Penny (beta)

The Who is the greatest rock and roll band of all time that has consistently made itself hard to like. Or easy to hate, depending on your point of view. A band that should be easily considered one of the top three or five rock groups of all time are, as the years go on, struggling to stay in the top 25 because they continue to make bad decision after bad decision. All for the sake of snatching up another buck or two.

And we’re not even talking about Pete Townsend, Roger Daltrey, and for good measure Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Paul McCartney – all of whom are older then Donald Trump – releasing new music. There’s no need to go there. It’s too easy a target. But of course we will: All the geriatric rock legends are guilty of continuing to poop out new music that should’ve remained a lump in their diapers but instead crawled its way, like some sentient glob animated by the special effects team of John Carpenter’s The Thing, onto our screens in the form of advertisements and ubiquitous purchase options.

It’s The Rolling Stones who are for some reason dead-set on claiming the throne of releasing awful music until the bitter end and perhaps using the unsold copies to insulate their mausoleum for heat. Their new album, Foreign Tongues, is due July 10 and should be the only non-American entity that the courts allow Trump to lock up in an undisclosed detention center.

But back to The Who and the pressing question that warranted this diatribe: What the fuck, man? Pete? Rog?

To list all the selling out The Who have done over the years would be a concerted but perhaps ultimately successful effort to break the Internet. But let’s target in on their latest atrocity, which should probably take the mantle of the most sacrilegious sell-out of them all: The Who whoring out one of their best songs, “Who Are You?,” to fucking Walmart. If you didn’t just vomit in your own mouth, you must be out of vomit.

Care to see the atrocity, in the event you haven’t already been subjected to it – or because you think we’re lying?

“Enjoy”:

Pete Townsend has a net worth of $150 million. Roger Daltrey has a net worth of $90 million. It’s a breath of fresh air that, across the world, the non-rich are finally asking why the ultra-wealthy need so much money. And we’re all for the billionaires opening their window shades to the sight of (figurative) pitchforks and torches surrounding their estates.

But why limit the criticism to just the billionaires? Why not ask the beloved artists in whom we’ve invested our money, time and adoration – and, 99 percent of the time, have voiced the concerns of those of us who otherwise don’t have a voice – why they need to take a paycheck from Walmart, a company that avoids paying $1 billion in taxes to the federal government every year?

https://sprawl-busters.com/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/BoycottWalmart2012/
https://united4respect.org/campaigns/walmart/

This entry was posted on 06/28/2026 at 8:38 am and is filed under Essays with tags Pete Townsend, Roger Daltry, the Who, Walmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.