1978 Rock Anthem, With 'Remarkably Complex' Guitar, Became Theme Song for No. 1 TV Show Decades Later
If The Who's 1978 classic "Who Are You" has been running through your head lately, you're definitely not alone: The hit song was repurposed for a Walmart commercial that's been playing on TV nonstop lately ("Who knew? Who knew?"), and why not? "Who Are You" is already associated with small screen success.
Long before the track started showing up on TV, "Who Are You" was a single from The Who's album of the same name (the last the band released before the death of drummer Keith Moon). As Pete Townshend explained in the liner notes for the album's reissue, the song was inspired by a wild evening out with a pair of fellow rockers.
"‘Who Are You' was written about meeting Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols after an awful 13-hour encounter with Allen Klein who, in my personal opinion, is the awesome rock leech-godfather," Townshend wrote, per American Songwriter. "In one sense the song is more about the demands of new friendship than blood-letting challenge.
Townshend went on to praise Roger Daltrey's "aggressive reading of my nihilistic lyric" before noting that "Steve and Paul became real ‘mates' of mine in the English sense. We socialized a few times. Got drunk (well, I did) and I have to say to their credit, for a couple of figurehead anarchists, they seemed sincerely concerned about my decaying condition at the time."
"We were getting incredible accolades from some of the new punk bands," Daltrey told Uncut magazine in 2015. "They were saying how much they loved The Who, that we were the only band they'd leave alive after they'd taken out the rest of the establishment! But I felt very threatened by the punk thing at first. To me, it was like, ‘Well, they think they're f–king tough, but we're f–king tougher.' It unsettled me in my vocals. When I listen back to ‘Who Are You?' I can hear that it made me incredibly aggressive."
Townshend's guitar is no less angry than Daltrey's vocals. Joe Taysom of Far Out called Townshend's performance on "Who Are You" "visceral and fueled by pent-up rage."
"Even when he's angry, Townshend still manages to dream up a rhythm part that is remarkably complex, elegant and measured," Taysom wrote. "It provided the perfect backdrop for Keith Moon to add his searing drums and Roger Daltrey to deliver the most aggressive vocal take of his career."
'Who Are You' was the theme song for one of the most successful crime series of all time
In addition to the aforementioned Walmart commercial, "Who Are You" has been featured on TV in shows including Scrubs and Two and a Half Men, but it's most famously linked with the crime drama series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
During its 15-year-run on CBS, which kicked off in 2000, CSI was the network's most successful series with the highest ratings, winning six Primetime Emmy Awards.
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This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 7:16 PM.