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You could stop this song after four seconds and still hear why the Who's first single launched their career back in 1965, why they continued to open shows with it decades later, and why it remains a favorite more than 40 years on. Those syncopated bursts of contained explosion constitute one of the most perfect power-pop riffs ever strummed, and the only way to improve on it is to add Keith Moon's hyperactive drumming to fill in the charged silences between the chords. If that's all there was to "I Can't Explain"... well, it would have probably still made the list, but the snake attached to that head is a great song as well as a persuasive argument against originality in rock.
Written by Pete Townsend as a blatant Kinks rip-off, "I Can't Explain" ably replicates the Davies' herky-jerky rock rhythms right down to the handclaps, but the Who supe it up with American pop harmonies and a hooky chorus that hints at their meaty, beaty, big and bouncy singles to follow. Writing in Rolling Stone in the early 1970s, Townsend mused, "It seems to be about the frustrations of a young person who is so incoherent and uneducated that he can't state his case to the bourgeois intellectual blah blah blah. Or, of course, it might be about drugs." Either way it's also about the best song the Who ever recorded. --Stephen M. Deusner |