A group consisting of thousands of screaming tweens is on a crusade to obliterate The Who, a band that may or may not exist.
It all started when 1D — as the British boy band is known by its fans — released the best song ever written, subtly titled “Best Song Ever,” which sounds suspiciously like The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
As The AV Club points out, the song’s producer has noted the similarities between the best song of all time and another song by a group of old fogies before, but music site ClickMusic recently reviewed the song and said that the boy band had “sterilized” The Who’s classic tune.
For some reason unbeknownst to anyone with common sense or anyone who knows how the Internet works, 1D fans thought that this meant the song would be “deleted” forever.
Late Wednesday night, One Direction fans on Twitter started the hashtag #DontTouchBestSongEver in an attempt to squash the spirits of The Who members, half of whom are DEFINITELY monitoring Twitter, half of whom are dead.
“WHO THE HELL IS THE WHO EVEN?? Like wtf? No one even knows you,” one fan tweeted.
Another wrote, “Are you sure you want to mess with this fandom?Think about it twice.”
Someone else wrote, in a tweet that is presumably not a joke, “THIS FANDOM WON FIERCEST FANS CATEGORY AT RADIO DISNEY AWARDS DO U REALIZE WE WON AN AWARD FOR BEING PSYCHOTIC AND DELUSIONAL IM SO PROUD.”
On Thursday, The Who lead singer Pete Townshead issued a statement assuring One Direction fans that he had no intention of taking legal action towards the boy band, and even saying that he liked the song, which is honorable but also a blatant lie:
“No! I like the single. I like One Direction. The chords I used and the chords they used are the same three chords we’ve all been using in basic pop music since Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry made it clear that fancy chords don’t mean great music – not always.”
“I’m still writing songs that sound like Baba O’Riley – or I’m trying to!. It’s a part of my life and a part of pop’s lineage. One Direction are in my business, with a million fans, and I’m happy to think they may have been influenced a little bit by The Who.”
Listen to a YouTube mashup of the two songs: