In the 50s, it was what pop represented rather than said that made it dangerous, and that therefore underlined its appeal to its audience. Rocknroll was code for sex, of course. Dancing was the vicarious stand-in you could do in public. Rebellion was in rocknroll’s DNA, but rarely did it try to incite a riot. By the 60s, The Who may have been sidestepping swearing, but they were also explicitly saying dangerous things. They directly reflected, and amplified, their audience’s urges — it’s not just you, you are part of My Generation. “Hope I die before I get old” they sang. Such had an audience’s expectation of authenticity intensified that the line is repeatedly thrown back at an ageing Pete Townshend, like some reneged-on manifesto. You promised us! You let us down!

If a death wish was shocking, the explicit pledge of suicide that arrived with Mott The Hoople’s (OK, Bowie’s) All The Young Dudes was even more so.

Well he rapped all night about his suicide

Said he’d kick it in the head when he reached 25

Don’t want to stay alive

When you’re 25

This is the unthinkable re-cast as the merely obvious. The ennui rises from those lines like a dismissive wave of the hand. Not so much a rebel yell as a deliberately bored whatevs. If The Who got more explicit about identity, what Bowie nailed was belief — specifically, a teenager’s lack of it in anything other than their own youth.

The 70s took a lot of 60s ideas and extended them, stretched, made them more extreme. But here’s the thing. Suicide was never really the point. Getting old, for the Mod kid in My Generation, and for Bowie’s Dude, signifies giving up, giving in. They may appear to offer a cheap promise to end it all, but each song is really a collective summoning of youthful rage. They are pop pledges to not go gentle into that good night. They are a reckoning with the tired, middle-aged minds that controlled what you could and couldn’t do, think, and believe, even during the 60s and 70s. These were minds not so much burnt out as dried up — limp rags with the fun and hope systematically twisted out. Know-it-alls turned awful cold, putting people down, just because they get around. Imagine that level of antipathy. Townsend’s astute diagnosis of its source was jealousy. Kids felt victims of a generational judgment that was fuelled by envy — the envy of those who missed out, who sidelined themselves from the fun, and turned their bitterness on the youth that came after them.

My Generation didn’t come out of nowhere. It is a reaction, a resistance to what its audience feared it might turn into. Hope I die before I become like that.

And if I do — well, might as well kick it in the head.

All The Young Dudes and My Generation lifted the veil. They represented a new possibility — the possibility of rejecting what your parents and their peers presumed fundamental. They gave permission to the pop audience to dismiss those conventions for what they were — pure pretence, a mere construct, one that people decided to believe in but make everyone else pay for. These songs were the moment pop went full-on Holden Caulfield, pointing out and sneering at the phonies, wanting nothing for itself other than the right to be different, the right to be new, the right to be right. It was the start of a generational sulk we’ve yet to talk ourselves out of.

And that — that’s what being a teenager really feels like. But Faster went even further.