High Hopes

So my usual bone to pick with Pink Floyd is that Roger Waters is too much of a downer, especially in later years. (And don’t get me started on his whacked-out solo albums.) On the other hand, he was plainly the guiding light of Pink Floyd, because it just wasn’t the same without him. There’s been some heated debate as to whether or not David Gilmour was worthy enough to get custody of the name in the acrimonious split-up of the old partnership. There’s a lot of emotional side-taking involved. My opinion is, since what Gilmour produced under the Floyd banner after Waters left sounded a lot more Floydian that what Waters could come up with on his own, it was a just decision. I’ll also give it to Gilmour that The Division Bell was a lot more enjoyable an album than The Final Cut, or anything Waters has done in the meantime. Nevertheless, there was a sense of something missing, some spark of vitality that probably had less to do with Roger Waters being so great and all, and more about missing the friction of the collaboration itself. Gilmour followed through on a lot of favorite Pink Floyd themes; alienation, nostalgia, the passage of time. The atmosphere he achieved was mostly a kind of rueful melancholy, which is fine, but without Waters’ customary bitterness and anger it did get a bit boring. As there hasn’t been any new Floyd since 1994, someone must have realized that the band was more than the sum of its parts and should be allowed to die with as much dignity as Waters and Gilmour’s feud would allow. Like a lot of people, I certainly wish those two had figured out some way to continue getting along, but after so many years of behaving like a pissed-of divorced couple, a reunion seems like a bad idea.

Hey You

More Pink Floyd depressingness. I personally much prefer the early Floyd years, back when one of them had a sense of humor. In later years they just got too weighed down by existential malaise. Those are my usual Floyd complaints, but that doesn’t mean I don’t fully appreciate The Wall. It is a masterpiece and completely deserves its ongoing popularity. It also figures that its very depressingness may account for its popularity. Because people like being harmlessly bummed out as much as they enjoy being cheered up. Hey You is certainly a very astute portrait of desperate loneliness, and if we haven’t all sunk exactly that low, we still imagine that we had. And if we’ve grown past associating the pain of not having a date on Friday with the pain of psychosis the song describes, then we’re probably old enough to have known someone who genuinely was that low. Then we can thank our lucky stars we’re not poor old Pink and we feel loads better.

Have a Cigar

Pink Floyd bites the hand that feeds them. Greedy record executives (the very same ones who helped make you famous in the first place) are an easy target, almost too easy. For bands who become wildly successful but don’t want to feel like they’ve sold out, it’s very convenient to blame the evil record company for any moves they make that might seem too ‘commercial’ and threaten to sully their self-image of authenticity. It may have been slightly traumatic, judging from songs like this one, Money and many others, for Pink Floyd to transition from wildly experimental but not terribly popular underground sensation to million-selling world superstars. Roger Waters, for one, was never a big fan of ‘The Man’ and the mass culture he commands. Being a successful act at a major record label must have felt somewhat like taking sides with corporate culture. Even the money didn’t ease the pain as much as it was expected to. Though I expect he must have gotten used to it by now, in the seventies Waters seemed to have some pretty mixed feelings about suddenly being hugely popular. Fame wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, big surprise. Roger Waters wasn’t the first or last to discover that being a rich and famous rock star could be kind of hollow, meaningless and possibly a bit sleazy. Nor was he the first or last to write songs about how slimy record companies can be. But if you had to choose one song about the evils of record execs, this is the best one. Far and away.

Goodbye Blue Sky

Pink Floyd’s The Wall is the nightmare of a generation. On the most immediate level, the album is the personal exorcism of Roger Waters, but if it weren’t so much more than that, it most certainly wouldn’t have caught on. The Wall illustrates the psychic bruises of a generation born during and immediately after the Second World War, and yet it’s more than that, because the damage done lingers on in the generation born long after the air raid sirens faded away. It only takes the nightmares of the parents to fill the children with fear. I was born on the tail end of the Cold War and raised in a politically sheltered environment, safe enough from any real threat it would seem, but I still have nightmares of air raids and bombing, based entirely on stories  my grandmother had told me when I was little. Stories that painted a horrifyingly vivid threat, even though she herself had been too young to endure the frontline or the blockade. Sometimes I wake up crying because I had just died in my dream. I have had dreams where bombers pass overhead, their cargo whizzing down audibly and in slow motion, me feeling the heat wave, feeling my eardrums explode and the world turn red, and wake up sweating and crying. It’s personal trauma passed down by word of mouth, and it’s collective trauma passed down not through anything as dry as a history book, but through the art and literature created by the survivors and the survivors of the survivors. I wonder sometimes at the innocence of Americans, virginal enough to think of assassinations and terrorist attacks as horrific anomalies, treating their  veterans – their truly wounded – as an easily forgotten minority, and compare the mentality of anybody else – Germans, Russians, English, Japanese – hardened by hundreds of years of being under attack, bombed, invaded, surrounded by enemies, how stoic and cynical and prepared to suffer, waiting it feels like for the next Blitz and the next Blockade, filling their children with fear to prepare them for the next war out of hundreds.

The Gnome

You wont’ recognize this as Pink Floyd if you grew up hearing Another Brick In The Wall on the radio. (I have a real problem with douchebags who say they’re Pink Floyd fans but don’t know who Syd Barrett was.) Roger Waters certainly had a different worldview than Barrett. He may well be a charming fellow in real life, but on he’s long used his music as a means of therapy for himself. He likes to write about Mommy issues, shitty relationships, the trauma of WWII and other depressing things. Syd Barrett wanted to write about gnomes named Grimble-Gromble. It’s possible that besides the blinding drug abuse, Syd’s fall from grace had something to do with his disconnect from the other visionary in the band. They obviously had vast personality differences, and David Gilmour in his short overlap with Barrett was no help. Though Waters and Gilmour hate each other now, they made a brilliant partnership for many years. Those two were much more simpatico than Waters and Barrett. Perhaps Barrett’s decline was (like that of Brian Jones) precipitated by frustration of losing creative control and not liking the direction his band took as they gained increasing success. After Barrett dropped out, they did for a while carry on in a similar mystical, psychedelic vein. Then they got insanely popular, and increasingly depressing, and got no less pessimistic about the human condition after Waters took off too. I’m exactly disparaging their evolution, for it did yield a lot of classic material. On the other hand, I don’t like any Pink Floyd albums after The Wall, nor the solo work of Roger Waters. The misanthropy just lies too thick for my taste.

Echoes

Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. The greatest, most profound concert movie ever filmed. Is it still a concert if there’s no audience, you ask. Yes. The lack of live listeners doesn’t isn’t a lack at all, it’s more like the balance of negative space. They played for the acoustics, and for the visuals. The beauty and strangeness of the surroundings complement the music. There’s no distraction – everything flows together. Even more than being perfect, the visuals actually make the music more tactile. It makes you feel every nuance. Take a moment, also, to appreciate how incredible everything, on a technical filmmaking, level is. It’s beautifully filmed, unlike most concert/documentaries, like a real movie. No one ever notices editing, but the editing is perfect, seamless, impeccable. And of course, the band’s playing is celestial. Before the inevitable tragedy of chart-dominating, ego wallowing rancor drove a wedge between them, the four members of Floyd were a matchless creative unit. It’s almost too bad they became so successful. It wasn’t good for them, as a group.

Dogs

Pink Floyd, depressing side out. Truthfully, I almost never listen to Animals, because it’s slow, bitter and single-free. Same reason I never put The Final Cut on either. BTW, visitors of London are strongly advised to try and get a look at the still beguiling Battersea Power Station. I took a picture of it from the train. It has a certain monolithic industrial beauty.

Cymbeline

The Soundtrack From the Film More. I spent a lot of effort tracking down that album (still only have it in mp3 form.) All for the sake of one song, this one. Cymbeline must be my favorite Pink Floyd song. That I’m the only one on the planet who thinks so is alright. There’s simply nothing more beautiful in their canon than the moment Gilmour sings “Hiiiiggghhh tiiiime, Cymbeline.” Makes me feel all shivery. The worst torture was the years when I wanted to hear the song and couldn’t remember who or what it was. That was a long time ago, I was a child. And if the sound quality of the tape or the video is horrendous, that almost makes me happy. To hear the beauty piercing through the distortion adds to the pleasurel. It’s meaningful because it’s rare and hard-won.

Crying Song

Any knucklehead can enjoy The Wall or Dark Side – those albums are accessible to any idiot. No offense to those albums, and they are rewarding to any listener. But jerks who claim to be Floyd fans because they like The Wall are deluding themselves. The famous, easier albums are the gateway to something deeper. For example, the soundtrack for the film More, is known only to deeply dedicated followers. It may be uncharted territory for most, but it is one of the finest moments of Floyd, a psychedelic triumph, an album with range and diversity, and spiked with beauty. I find it funny that Pink Floyd manages to be one of the most mainstream rock acts, with ubiquitous singles like Another Brick In the Wall and Comfortably Numb, while on the other hand a large chunk of their output remains in the realm of the cult. It’s a very unusual and extreme duality.

Comfortably Numb

Leave it to Pink Floyd to put out a feature length music video about the debilitating psychic damage of WWII. Starring, for no reason, Bob Geldof. (I have little use of Geldof and even less for his trashy offspring.) Anyhow, in The Wall he’s most obviously the alter-ego of one Roger Waters, and more generally an alter-ego for a whole traumatized generation. WWII was traumatic enough for those who fought in it, but they at least have some sense of accomplishment to ease the shell shock. The kids who had to grow up with the air raids, rations, and overall horror came out scared and damaged as well. Roger Waters has elected himself the spokesperson of those whose sensitive young minds were indelibly marked by the terrors of the Blitz and the hardships that came immediately after the war. Not that he’s the only one. It’s a prominent theme in the Who’s Tommy, just to name a somewhat similar example. It’s an interesting thing to stop and think about. The same generation in America grew up to be  the spoiled and self-indulgent Baby Boomers, who had everything handed to them in a plastic Tupperware bowl. In their typically navel-gazing way, those folks think their experience was universal. In reality, across the pond, the postwar children had a very, very different experience growing up. And, ergo, a different mentality in adulthood. The American and European war babies really have nothing in common except a handful of cultural references. Which this song is one of.