10 Greatest Screams In Rock Music History
1. Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who
One of the biggest balances in rock music is knowing when to scream and when not to scream. Whenever you feel the need to reach that level of intensity with your voice, you always have to time it right to make sure if has just the right amount of punch to hit the listener in the face. And as much as Pete Townshend's second rock opera Lifehouse never came to fruition, the final few seconds of Won't Get Fooled Again is about as close as it gets to rock and roll perfection.
Keep in mind though...this is far from Roger Daltrey's best vocal performance, with songs like Love Reign O'er Me having a much better payoff throughout most of the song. If we're talking about the raw screams though, the ending of this song is about as gutteral as he ever got, teasing you at the first breakdown by having a standard scream to bring in the final verse of the song. Once everything else drops out and we're left with just the synthesizers, Keith Moon really sets Roger up with the drums, throwing in little fills and even a bar of 2/4 so that we'll be caught off guard when he actually does hit that scream.
Lifehouse was intended to be all about finding your own salvation through music, and hearing that scream is like Roger trying to physically kick down the door of your mind through aggression alone. You can bring up the memes of CSI and the sunglasses all you want, but we wouldn't have gotten something like that if the song wasn't already concentrated kickass.