The Who's Gone

I was going to write something about the awful spectacle of Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey impersonating themselves and The Who during halftime at the most recent Super Bowl, but then I read this from Carrie Brownstein and decided the she says it all:

If you did watch Sunday's game, and you stayed put on the couch during halftime, then you would have seen The Who -- or at least its two surviving members, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey -- play an enervated, bordering-on-delusional medley of its greatest hits. Already performing as caricatures of their former selves ("Tommy" glasses: check; windmill: check, sort of), Townshend and Daltrey further sterilized the performance by playing in the center of a gargantuan replica, either of a Mod symbol or an LP. Nowhere near them were fans, so they really did look like a museum piece from afar, a middle-of-the-night TV ad for some golden-oldies CD collection that comes with toy versions of The Who playing atop a spinning LP. (Put it on your mantel!) The stage was lit up like a carnival ride and bursting with pyrotechnics, and not a single ounce of the fire or brightness was coming from the music. Relics, dusted off and propped up.

Read Brownstein's entire post at Hope I Die Before I Get Old: When Should Death Break Up A Band?  I would agree with Brownstein that that The Who departed this life years ago, if not with the death of their irreplaceable drummer, Keith Moon, then certainly with the death of their thundering bassist, John Entwistle.