Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Three

Going Mobile

"Going Mobile" by The Who is a song about driving and the freedom of the road. It's on the album Who's Next, which was released in 1971, fifty-five years ago this summer. "Going Mobile" was originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project. Lifehouse was to have been not only a rock opera but also a whole, complex, and very ambitious multimedia and audience-participation project. It's fair to say that Lifehouse was visionary. Its goals or end products may very well have been unreachable. I confess that I don't understand very well just what it was supposed to have been. But imagine if it had come about.

The cover of Who's Next is an oblique reference to science fiction, specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Standing alone and without the reference, it has a decadent or post-apocalyptic look to it. The strange sky was added later to give the image, in the words of photographer Ethan Russell, "this otherworldly quality." The band was driving when they saw the monolith. They got out of their car, took the picture, and got back in again to drive away.

Lifehouse was a science-fictional concept, and so "Going Mobile" is, in its origins, a science-fictional song. I have two quotes to help explain Lifehouse. Here is Pete Townshend himself:

The essence of the story-line was a kind a futuristic scene [. . . .] It's a fantasy set at a time when rock 'n' roll didn't exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were on television. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who'd kept rock 'n' roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.

And here is a quote from Wikipedia. I like this one better. It's clearer to me and more concise:

Lifehouse is set in the near future in a society in which music is banned and most of the population live indoors in government-controlled "experience suits." A rebel, Bobby, broadcasts rock music into the suits, allowing people to remove them and become more enlightened. Some elements accurately describe future technology; for example, The Grid resembles the internet and "grid sleep" resembles virtual reality.

So Pete Townshend invented the Internet. Take that, Al Gore.

I wrote recently about Billy Idol's multimedia project Cyberpunk, from 1993. I wonder if he could have been inspired or influenced in any way by Lifehouse, not in any of its details but in the larger idea that science-fictional or futuristic concepts could be combined with rock music and its technology to create something big and meaningful, even profound, certainly visionary.

Reading descriptions of Lifehouse leads me to think that it's dystopian and about a controlled society. I have another long quote from Wikipedia. Bear with me. This is going somewhere:

Bobby is the creator of Lifehouse. He is a hacker who broadcasts pirate radio signals advertising his concert, where the participants' personal data are taken from them and converted into music, quite literally "finding your song." At the climax of the album, the authorities have surrounded the Lifehouse; then the perfect note rings forth through the combination of everybody's songs, they storm the place to find everybody has disappeared through a sort of musical Rapture, and the people observing the concert through their Lifesuits have vanished as well.

I have been listening to a lot of '80s music and watching '80s videos. Several of these are dystopian and/or science-fictional in their imagery. One in particular made me think of Lifehouse, if I'm thinking about Lifehouse in the right way. The video is for the song "The Politics of Dancing" by the British new wave group Re-Flex. At first glance, the video is an espionage/suspense/thriller type of story, but it's actually about a dystopian society in which a political authority is trying to control musical expression. The mustachioed visage in the video is not that of Big Brother but of his opposite, the face of the resistance. A political authority--the political establishment--is trying to locate him, to stop him from broadcasting music from a pirate station called Re-Flex Radio. That authority is trying to keep young people from enjoying themselves and hearing things of which the establishment disapproves. In short, it's trying to control information. Here are some lyrics:

We got the message

I heard it on the airwaves

The politicians are now DJs

The broadcast was spreading

Station to station

Like an infection across the nation

Compare that to the lyrics of the Who song "Relay," which was added to Lifehouse, for example:

From tree to tree

From you to me

Traveling twice as fast as on any freeway

Every single dream

Wrapped up in the scheme

They all get carried on the relay

I'm not sure that the lyrics of "The Politics of Dancing" quite match the action in the video, but the video carries its own weight. As in Lifehouse, there is an underground leader who is trying to get the message out about music, dancing, and fun. He's a subversive, doing something forbidden by the establishment, broadcasting from an illegal radio station. At the end of the video, as in Lifehouse (as described above), the authority arrives at the station only to find the studio empty. The musicians have vanished.

"The Politics of Dancing" was released in 1983, perhaps in anticipation of 1984. I can't say whether Re-Flex was influenced by The Who and Lifehouse, but they didn't have to be. Political authorities try to control information. They want to silence differing opinions, disagreement, and dissent. They characterize opposing words and ideas as disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. They are in the business of trying to control people's lives. One way to begin is to control what people can say and think. O'Brien in 1984 understands that. Rock musicians and songwriters know it intuitively, and they might even have personal experience with it. Of course they will write songs of protest and resistance. Rock music by its very nature is anti-establishment. When the police turn off your amplifier, you do what George Harrison did in his rooftop venue and turn it back on again.

Whether Pete Townshend intended it or not, "Going Mobile" is an anti-establishment song, especially now, fifty-five years later. He wrote:

I don't care about pollution

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy

That's my solution

Watch the police and the taxman miss me

I'm mobile.

Those are the words of a free man, or a man aspiring to be free. The establishment is against him, most especially the establishment of today:

• The free man sings, "I don't care about pollution." (This was before carbon dioxide--a naturally occurring chemical compound generated by nearly every living thing and essential for life on earth--was classed as a pollutant.) The current establishment is "green," carbon-neutral, and pressing for zero emissions by which the people will be controlled, thereby impoverished and immiserated. Or maybe it's the other way around.

• He is air-conditioned. They believe on the other hand that air-conditioning is "a scourge," as Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire recently said. Evidently it's not a scourge for the high-ranking people in the European Commission, including Frau von der Leyen, for during the recent heat wave, they got to keep theirs while the Ugnaughts and Troglytes who labored away in the floors below them did not. And here we thought Europe is a democracy. The current controversy has gone so far that Wikipedia now has a page called "The Politics of Air Conditioning." I can't wait for the song.

• The free and mobile man avoids the police. In the United Kingdom at least, the police are an instrument of the establishment. It and the people who support it love the police. There the police will come knocking on your door if you write or say something the establishment doesn't like. That's how they get you to shut up. You can't make your escape the way the musicians do in the video for "The Politics of Dancing." You can't disappear among your own culture and society. You don't have that freedom.

• The free and mobile man avoids the taxman. The establishment on the other hand embraces him, for he's one of their agents of punishment and control. They'll even go so far as to say that paying taxes is patriotic, as our previous president, John Gill, did in 2008. What a bizarre inversion. What a non sequitur. I'm not going to go looking for the first protest song in rock music. "Taxman" by the Beatles (1966) is far enough. In case you haven't heard it, the Fab Four--specifically the songwriter George Harrison--were obviously not in favor. By excessive taxation, the people will also be impoverished and immiserated, and they will be controlled. Beyond that, their tax money will be doled out to people who want to stab and rape them. Another form of punishment, another means of control.

• Finally, the free man is mobile. Beep beep! They want him to stay put. They hate and fear the freedom that allows a man to go mobile, and they understand that mobility is an exercise in what is to them an intolerable personal freedom. The man driving down the highway is pursuing his own happiness. They can't have that. They want his mobility and thereby his freedom to be restricted. They want him to depend on them for his meager portion of happiness. For example, several American states are either already at it or are looking into ways to tax people on the number of miles they drive. There is also talk of installing a kill switch in new cars. In the United Kingdom, there is a controversy about "15-minute cities." Those in the establishment call it a right-wing conspiracy theory that one of the purposes of building 15-minute cities is to limit mobility. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but when someone in the establishment starts talking about "right-wing conspiracy theories," we should start paying attention. They could be letting us know what they want to do.

There was also of course the big push to force people into electric cars. That push is also about control and about limiting mobility and thereby freedom. There is an old propaganda poster, "When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!" I would paraphrase that to read that when you ride in an electric car, you ride with the enemy of your own freedom. That's not as catchy, but it obtains. In "Joy Connection," I showed an advertisement, including a picture of an automobile, in which the point was made that there are two choices, the first being this: "You can let a government decree what you shall do, what you shall buy, and how much you shall pay." That was the story with electric cars under President John Gill's administration and under other political authorities, present and recently past. Thankfully, all of that seems to be coming to an end, in the United States at least, with no longer the coercion and the big push and very rapid declines in the sales of electric cars. Talk about a scourge. Not the cars so much as the politics behind them.

I know I went pretty far in all of that. The most recent commenter on this blog will probably get on me about being insane or unhinged or silly or childish. I think he's trying to get me to shut up. In contrast, I'm not trying to get him to shut up. It's better when people disagree with and debate each other. It forces everyone to think about where he or she stands and to refine his or her ideas. Trees, bones, muscles, and ideas are made stronger by resistance.

Anyway, my points are these:

First, "Going Mobile" the song and going mobile the activity are about freedom. The establishment doesn't like freedom. They want control. In the 1960s and '70s, when they were not in control, liberals, leftists, and progressives were anti-establishment and pro-freedom. Now that they are in control, they are the opposite. What changed? Well, Pete Townshend provided an answer to that in the last words sung on Who's Next: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." Nothing actually changed. The establishment always (or almost always) seeks control. They are anti-freedom. The current establishment are no exception. They who grew up in the 1960s through the 1980s but are now in control have no claim to the music and songs of freedom. For them to go to concerts and wear rock-and-roll t-shirts and act like fans now is a kind of cultural appropriation. Those things are ours, regardless of our youth or age. They should cut it out.

Second, as part of Lifehouse, "Going Mobile" is science-fictional. That leads me back to the idea that started me on this whole series, which is that the car story (or song) is or may be a kind of low science fiction.

Still to come: More science-fictional songs, a few Gothic or horror or weird-fictional songs, and then the long road back to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Did you think I was done with that yet?

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley