It figures. Just when the Who had ceased to matter much–the band members having channeled a lot of their power and volatility and commitment into solo careers, employing the Who chiefly as a vehicle to take a greatest-hits revue on the road – it figures that they'd make their most vital and coherent album since Who's Next. It's fitting that It's
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Hard is a great record because, given the inverted world of Pete Townshend's mind, it's what you were least expecting.
The measure of worth of a Who album is the passion that Pete Townshend brings to it, and whether that passion translates into songs from which a group voice can emerge, so that it makes sense for the Who to be playing them. That hadn't been the case in too long a time. Thus, Empty Glass, Townshend's audacious 1980 solo album, found him stepping away from the band's aegis and sounding surer of himself than he had in years, while Face Dances, the lackluster Who album that came in its wake, seemed to indicate that the Who had played out their rope. Townshend's recent solo LP, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, depicted the artist's descent into an abyss of excess – and his heroic reemergence – in an obsessive, soul-baring orgy of ornate, cryptic verse and tough, tensile music. Surely by now he'd demonstrated that he could stand alone, and that he could command attention with his own voice.
Why, then, dig in with the Who all over again? Curiously, it partly has to do with the fact that Townshend must concede some of his freedom to the group process. As he put it in a recent interview: "... the Who provide me with a platform and a set of restrictions, constraints and limitations that are important." Those limitations apparently help Townshend focus his writing, which tended to wander abstractly through Chinese Eyes. By comparison, the generally broader, more politically minded lyrics of It's Hard seem as straightforward as the evening news. Beyond that, however, Townshend's renewed ties to the Who symbolize his rapprochement with the world after a period of exile in the wasteland. For the first time, he may have needed the Who more than they needed him – as a demonstration of the cooperative interaction that's necessary to get things done in the world, and as a unified front prepared to do battle with some of the pressing problems of our time through the medium of rock & roll. In any event, It's Hard is a strong affirmation of this band's ability to reach millions with powerful rock & roll and trenchant, galvanizing politics.
The key to the album is "I've Known No War," a song that could become an anthem to our generation much the way "Won't Get Fooled Again" did a decade ago. "I've Known No War" is one conscientious objector's statement of defiant opposition, tempered by the realities of the present day. To wit, that a nuclear war, despite our best pacifistic inclinations, is
