Why baba o riley

Crossing things off the list is the easy part. Deciding what this Who classic is about is more complicated. By , when Pete Townshend wrote this song, he was no longer satisfied with power chords and clever stuttering. Against his wishes, he had grown older, and his sense of the cosmos had grown more complex. Some avant-garde musical concepts had even wormed their way into his old school rock and roll. The result was "Baba O'Riley," written as the opening piece for his never-completed rock opera Lifehouse.

Townshend was no stranger to rock opera, and he intended Lifehouse to follow his previous project, Tommy. Since Lifehouse was never brought to the stage, all we have in "Baba O'Riley" is a beginning without a clear middle or end.

Nevertheless, we'll do our best to make sense of this song, starting with what there is to know about the rock opera it was meant to introduce. Although the details of the plot changed over the course of its crafting, Townshend's basic ideas remained the same. At point in the future, humanity is reduced to an unreal existence. Controlled by a tyrannical government and forced indoors by deadly pollution, people have lost touch with nature, God, and themselves.

Their "reality" is a spoon-fed illusion. Encased in "experience suits," they are fed "life" food, relaxation, entertainment, etc. Lo and behold, a visionary arises who remembers the liberating power of rock and roll. He builds the Lifehouse, where people can be freed from their artificial lives through music, and he calls people to this lifesaving building over pirated airwaves. A farm girl hears the message and sets off on a pilgrimage to the Lifehouse. Her parents, Ray and Sally, leave their farm to find her.

Now you should be able to see why "Baba O'Riley" was supposed to come at the beginning. We'll travel south cross land" is Ray's voice, asking his wife to come with him and look for their daughter.

At this point, you're probably wondering who Baba O'Riley is. This is where the story gets more complicated, and where the evolution of Townshend's personal beliefs over the years becomes more important.

This self-proclaimed avatar, or incarnation of God, was born in in central India. He experienced a religious awakening at age nineteen when he was kissed on the head by a holy woman. After that, he studied with other spiritual masters and cultivated the mystical experiences that would lead him closer to holiness. By the age of 30, he had built a following. Then he took a vow of silence that he kept until his death in At the heart of Baba's teaching was the idea that "reality" was actually an illusion, just a bundle of erroneous beliefs and perceptions formed by weak and unholy minds.

The Who have produced a live version of the song with a violin, provided by Nigel Kennedy, during their 27 November concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The song's iconic backing track was derived from deep within the Lifehouse concept.

Townshend wanted to input the life information of Meher Baba into a synthesizer, which would then generate music based on that information. That music would have been the backing track for "Baba O'Riley," but in the end, the frenetic sequence was played by Townshend on a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ using its marimba repeat feature.

The names of Riley and Meher Baba were incorporated into the song title as a tribute by Townshend. Although they never actually did it in concert, The Who considered pulling a person from the audience and programming their vital statistics into a synthesizer that would, in effect, translate that person into a musical theme around which a song could be built an idea later resurrected as the Lifehouse Method. A version of "Teenage Wasteland" is featured on The Lifehouse Chronicles, a six disc set of music related to the Lifehouse project, and on several Townshend compilations and videos.

The Who Wiki Explore. The band Pearl Jam usually presents a cover version in concerts, since In , the intro of the song was used in a Hewlett Packard commercial. The song was featured in an episode of season 4 of One Tree Hill at the end of the episode the characters where coming together after spending time to do projects to get to know each other. One of the working titles of That '70s Show was "Teenage Wasteland," a reference to the repeated lyric in the song. A pivotal montage sequence in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam is set to the song, which the character Richie apparently uses both as a cover with his rock band and as background music to his dancing at a gay theater.

At both the opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics , the synthesiser opening was used during a countdown to the start of the proceedings. Blue Man Group licensed the song for use in their theatrical performances. The song opens and closes the film Premium Rush. The intro for the song was used as the main character's ringtone in the UK drama serial The Fear. The song was used in the end of Control ", the fourteenth episode of the first season of the American drama series House.

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