OK Thorn, here goes, you asked for it, and you're gonna get it
Everyone else would best be advised to skip it, you'll probably be bored senseless.
i think the Roger Waters era of the Pink Floyd is nothing but an attempt to be poignant, descriptive instead of transcendant, and mucking about with grand themes like some educated Cambridge boy trying to be "weighty".
I'm tired of the perpetuating myth that the Floyd were deep. They weren't.
There seems to be a law of diminishing returns with them. On first encounter, usually in your teens, you think that all the obscure imagery and visuals and symbols of the band implies something deep and radical. But over time, it just doesn't add up. Waters' often cold and detached lyrics are a hint at this, which slowly dawns on you as you get out of your teens. The album
Animals seems to be righteously convinced that there is a social tier structure to society.. look hard enough and it decays as a merely a front for metaphors of oppression as metaphor-in-itself. I never once found a spark of visionary imagination in the Roger Waters era which could justify the respect they are automatically accorded --> Speaking about the world as a visualization of dogs, pigs and sheep (an unoriginal metaphor in anycase) divorced from reference to multiple layers of meaning or powerful handling of the material (such as a guy like Robert Johnson's use of visionary and fleet-footed imagery in close compact relation to each other, suggesting a powerfully complex and enriched awareness of the world grounded in a - yep - deepness of the mind which confounds
reductiveness, which is the worst sin of life without art). Waters handled the theme of social oppression with such barefaced literalness and stolid and brutal reductiveness, that it gives the impression of someone tackling themes which glimmer in the dark like fool's gold, and any educated person in modern days can tell that you
ought to be concerned about oppression in society, and such a person might even perhaps orchestrate a literal hierarchy whose values are coded according to your own station in life as a defence, but a good timeless art must apply more depth of vision to a work if it is to transcend being merely social science with musical interludes cradling its reductive vision of life. To this end, i keep Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan in mind when evaluating the worth of other artists.
Essentially, the way i see it, Waters’ primary motivation was his disgust and acute persecution complex over the business of making music and its contrary dimensions, and he was at least genuine in making his discomfort public. The problem arises when you consider the terminal and lifeless arc of his politics of resentment. It is even more unforgivable when you consider the wealth of music that existed in the mid and late 1970s elsewhere in rock. Pink Floyd seemed so barren musically. It's not a mark of genius to be churning out album after album from about 1975 onwards which seems to think that a constant limited shade of grey is a sign of waters which run deep (ha ha
), nor to mistake depression for worth.
Also, Pink Floyd was an unnecessary anachronism at a time when the music world was changing dramatically, and hence missed out on virtually all of the decade’s most vital and innovative musical developments. In the late 70s, the Pink Floyd seemed to act as though there was no future and no past, only a nihilistic and claustrophobic eternal present; no acknowledgement of anything exterior to themselves, no humanity. One thing that can be said for certain is that, in the late 70s, Pink Floyd became rock music’s most spectacular example of nihilistic brooding. I find nothing interesting about that.
This is what makes albums like
The Wall especially problematic. Although it purports to be Waters' attempts to wrestle with encroaching depression and destructive impulses, the crudity of the presentation and themes is adolescent and severely bombastic. In one sense, there is little difference between the lives shows that accompanied it and Broadway productions in New York.
I've said it before, though....the early 1970s for Floyd was something else entirely.. right up to
Dark Side, which seems to touch a universal chord and is quite humanistic. The experiments on
More and
Ummagumma hit and miss at the same time, but at least show a band fighting against creative torpor -- trying to be original, progressively refining a vision until they hit
Dark Side. There's even that hint of Krautrock on the title track of the
Obscured by Clouds album, and warm rich metaphors are all over the place in
Meddle and
Dark Side. The band was still a glowing force at that point. But it would all be over by
WYWH, which just sounds like death to me.
Honestly, who would pick
WYWH over something like
A Saucerful of Secrets or
Meddle or
More? Answer: Someone who's mind has been so warped by a taste for blandness that weak stabs at the viciously beautiful of life sounds like comforting cathedrals to the sheltered mind, that's who ;D
Everyone else would best be advised to skip it, you'll probably be bored senseless.
), nor to mistake depression for worth.