The Who’s Roger Daltrey: Woke Generation Creating A ‘Miserable World … For Themselves’
By Paul Bois
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“The Who” lead singer Roger Daltrey has joined the wave of rock musicians speaking out against woke culture and its effect on society.
Speaking with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music, the “Baba O’Riley” singer said that the “woke generation” is creating a “miserable world” for themselves and everyone else.
“It’s just getting harder to disseminate the truth,” Daltrey said. “It’s almost like, now we should turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth, and start to read books again. It’s becoming so absurd now with AI, all the tricks it can do, and the woke generation,” he said. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere. Especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to. We’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that.”
Daltrey compared the woke generation with previous generations.
“We came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society, completely flattened bomb sites and everything,” Daltrey said. “And we’ve been through socialist governments. We’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communist. I’ve seen how ‘wonderful’ — really? — it was.”
Daltrey previously supported Brexit and severed his ties with the U.K.’s Labour Party due to Jeremy Corbyn’s leftist extremism. His comments about woke culture follow comments made by Johnny Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the “Sex Pistols,” who said he fears the impact that cancel culture could have on American freedoms.
“These people aren’t really genuinely disenfranchised at all. They just view themselves as special,” Lydon told U.K.’s The Times. “It’s selfishness and in that respect it’s divisive and can only lead to trouble. I can’t believe that TV stations give some of these lunatics the space. Where is this ‘moral majority’ nonsense coming from when they’re basically the ones doing all the wrong for being so bloody judgmental and vicious against anybody that doesn’t go with the current popular opinion?”
“It’s just horribly, horribly tempestuous spoilt children coming out of colleges and universities with s*** for brains. And I put that in the most polite way,” he later added.
Simultaneously, punk rocker Glenn Danzig, frontman for The Misfits, said that punk rock would never see a full-blown resurgence so long as “cancel culture” remains in place.
“It was just like, ‘F*** your system, f*** all this bulls***.’ It was something else. I don’t think people will ever see anything like it again. There won’t be any new bands coming out like that. Now, they will immediately get canceled,” he told Rolling Stone.
Danzig added that wokeness would prevent the “punk explosion” from happening today.
“People don’t understand, because everything’s so cancel-culture, woke bulls*** nowadays, but you could never have the punk explosion nowadays, because of cancel culture and woke bulls***. You could never have it,” he added. “It would never have happened. We’re lucky it happened when it did, because it’ll never happen again. You won’t have any of those kinds of bands ever again. Everyone’s so uptight and P.C., it’s just like, ‘OK, whatever.’”