"Baba O'Riley" as written by and Pete Townshend....
Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland
Sally take my hand
We'll travel south cross land
Put out the fire
And don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together, before we get much older
Teenage wasteland
It's only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland
Oh yeah, teenage wasteland
They're all wasted
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland
Sally take my hand
We'll travel south cross land
Put out the fire
And don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together, before we get much older
Teenage wasteland
It's only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland
Oh yeah, teenage wasteland
They're all wasted
Lyrics submitted by Lucky1869_420, edited by Mellow_Harsher, bmcf1lm, richard105
"Baba O'Riley" as written by Peter Townshend
Lyrics © Spirit Music Group
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the title comes from 2 names: meher baba, petes mentor, and terry o'riley, a minimalist composer who inspired pete. pete set up a way to program information about people into a synthesizer so that every person would have a unique melody. he programmed in information about meher baba, such as his birthdate and his height, and came up with the background melody of baba oriley. the original loop was over 9 minutes long, but it was shortened for the song. people dont realize how revolutionary the whos synthesizer use was. now, every other song you hear has a synth loop, but in 1971, basically the only people experimenting with them in their music were the who and stevie wonder.
I don't know. The UK as a nation were not even involved in Vietnam militarily or in any regard. It was a much larger consciousness in the US obviously.
First verse seems to be sarcasm by young working people towards their more rebellious counterparts who have to 'fight' to prove themselves , who are wrong and then have be 'forgiven'
2nd verse sounds like the exodus of youth to Brighton 'getting together before they get much older'. Put out the fire may just mean moving on after stopping and camping
Teenage wasteland seems to be about all the energy wasted by youth revolt at the time. Sounds like a jab at the hippies and anti establishment
well i suppose not HATE, but it sure does irritate me.
Considering the number of songs we hear in a lifetime, we shouldn't have to expend so much energy to learn the name of a song just because of the song writer's whimsy. It's a trick name!
No...seriously....uhmm..it's about..planting. planting..eggs of, uh, barley. i mean, seeds. seeds of babaoriley...baboriley...babrley...barley! see?? Eggplant and Baba O'Riley are linked!
See? A completely random thought can have meaning, inserted into it by someone who doesn't have much of a clue about its true meaning!
Nah, actually, I agree with TaoAvatar20 (from the beginning.) That sounds like a reasonable meaning. I also agree with vipergt196 - who said this song is about having a pet armadillo. "Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals." Life as an armadillo can be hard, especially when you're a teenage one. "Get back into my living" means getting rolled up into your shell. All armadillos should get wasted once in a while. They should also have spiritual gurus and eat lots of eggplant and evict themselves from South Vietnam to the North Pole and use synthesizers named O'Riley on their gurus to turn them into eggplants. No, wait, they should use eggplants on their synthesizers to compose tunes about
RANDOM BULLSH*T LIKE THIS XD
thewho.net/articles/townshen/…
From Townshend's narration at the beginning of the BBC Lifehouse special, we learn that the Lifehouse film would have opened with this song -- opening credits would roll, the camera following the movements of a beat-up vehicle making its way across the wasteland. In the vehicle is Ray, Sally and their kids (apparently, they're from Scotland, where the air is still clean), on their way to try and secure, possibly via black-market, a chart-reading for a new, personalized Grid program. (There appears to be a shortage of novel Grid programs being provided by the government). The kids are whining that they want to go back home 'to Scotland' and Ray reassures them that they will be going home -- where they can see friends Dave and Mary -- just as soon as they get the chart done. The very fact that Sally and Ray have ventured out -- endangering themselves -- shows how discontented they are with their current Grid-lives. They show the same scepticism and apprehension towards the 'outside' that Mary and Dave initially have, but are ahead of the latter couple in being fed-up earlier on. Sally and Ray seem to gravitate towards Bobby's project before Mary eventually does.
As the opening song, "Baba O'Riley" provides the basic setting of a desolate, "teenage wasteland". "Sally, take my hand," Ray says, "we'll travel south crossland". There is a vague rumbling in the outskirts, a movement with individuals feeling compelled to gather and coalesce in hopes of the chance (or promise?) at 'spiritual revolution'. Biblical terminology is used throughout Lifehouse and occurs in this song when Ray tells Sally "The exodus is here, The happy ones are near…" (The "happy ones" likely referring to the Musos, a marginalized cult-like group that still practice the past art of "rock and roll music").
In one interview, Townshend described the outsiders as follows: "There are regular people, but they're the scum off the surface; there's a few farmers there, that's where the thing from 'Baba O'Riley' comes in. It's mainly young people who are either farmer's kids whose parents can't afford to buy them experience suits; then there's just scum, like these two geezers who ride around in a battered-up old Cadillac limousine and they play old Who records on the tape deck... I call them Track fans." (Pete Townshend, as quoted in The Who by John Swenson).
The profound influence of Sufi musician and philosopher Inayat Khan on Townshend's own thought is perhaps best conveyed in this song, with its mixing of hypnotic modal raga with the powerful I-V-IV chord progressions typical of Townshendian rock and roll. (As a sect of Islam, Sufism invokes more explicit mystical beliefs. Rather than focusing on the 'Five Pillars of Islam', Sufis seek ultimate religious experience through mystic trances or altered states often induced through twirling dances or the "whirling dervish"). Although Townshend seems to have scheduled "Baba O'Riley" at the beginning of Lifehouse, the song's trance-like, "whirling dervish" ending would have been most appropriate for Lifehouse's ending, when the crowd and the music reach a heightened emotional (and metaphysical) state, culminating in an explosive moment upon which they reach Nirvana and "disappear". (It is for this reason that I believe one of the Psychoderelict instrumental tracks, such as "Baba O'Riley (Demo)", should finish the Lifehouse song sequence, after "The Song is Over".