How the Stones, Who, and Beatles Faced the Punk Challenge (1978)

The Rolling Stones didn’t just survive punk — they absorbed its speed and sneer into Some Girls (1978) without losing their own identity. Jagger started dressing like a punk, the band cut songs down to three minutes, and tracks like “Respectable” and “Shattered” borrowed punk’s minimalist aggression. But underneath, they were still the Stones: Keith’s open-G riffs, Charlie’s swing, and lyrics about New York sleaze rather than political rage. It was a deliberate flex — showing they could play punk’s game better than most punks.

The Who, by contrast, sounded exhausted on Who Are You (1978), released the same year. The title track’s famous synth hook and Keith Moon’s manic drumming couldn’t hide the fact that the band was running on fumes. Pete Townshend admitted later that punk made him feel irrelevant — he didn’t try to compete, he just wrote about midlife confusion. The album feels like a band looking in the mirror, not at the kids in the street. And Moon died three weeks after it came out, effectively ending the original Who.

The Beatles had no response because they no longer existed. Their breakup in 1970 left a vacuum that punk filled in part by rejecting everything the Beatles represented: harmony, studio polish, utopian sentiment. But their absence also freed punk