Anyway Anyhow Anywhere :: Please Please Macao

Intro
Townshend’s iconic guitar intro (you can almost see him sneering as he slams those chords) tips the listener off immediately that a new element has been added into the Who’s formula of defiance: a spotlighting of unusual sounds, sounds for their own sake, not pressed into the service of moving the song forward (and this of course was an aural mirror of the pop art costumes they started strutting in at this time). XGD replicate this effect with their own extended undulating, digital intro.
Lyric
AAA is the ultimate rock portrayal of defiant youth (outside of, say, the Stones’ Street Fighting Man or certain punk anthems), so XGD’s dilemma was marrying that to a political scenario. Their solution becomes a humorous dissection of the rock stance, which crumbles when in Macao, where police brutality trumps attitude.
First Verse
The initial lyrics after the intro in both songs are said without music and are followed by different kinds of drum blasts (The Who’s features two snare hits from Moon; XGD’s is a weird dance of clicks and the sound of a distant explosion), reinforcing their raised-fist quality, like shouting at the Grand Canyon.
Second Verse
Both songs lower in volume here, becoming propulsive (although again Moon’s rolling style is replaced with a herky-jerk, synthetic stop-and-start pattern) and sinister. The last line in the verse, a restatement of the title which Daltrey allows to sustain and fade, is paralleled by Booth singing the title of his song, but adding the word “pretty” no less than four times.
Solo
The instrumental break in AAA is one of the great evolutionary moments in the rock form, in its deployment of sounds for their own sake, including guitar sounds which blatantly mimic non-“rock” sounds (Morse code, an airplane). For the first time, the center of a rock song becomes detached from the rest of it, detached in fact from time itself, and turns into a swirling black vortex where anything can happen, in any order. Xianggang Delight replicate the weightlessness of this passage by punctuating long repeated figures where “nothing” happens with explosions of sounds that relate to each of the sounds in the Who solo. A farfisa organ plays the Morse code pattern, and three actual airplane sounds from a sound effects record are inserted.
Coda
XGD, to match the Who’s abrupt return to the (now restrained seeming, after the song’s maelstrom) intro, go back to a variation on their own intro.