Rock Crimes: Roger Waters
By Oats on Jan 25, 2007
When I was in high school, my favorite band was Pink Floyd. Why? Teen angst + heavy classic-rock exposure + an interest in languid guitar solos, I guess. When I hit college, I kicked the habit hard. I sold all my Floyd to used-CD shacks on South Street. The t-shirts conveniently disappeared.
I still can’t bring myself to own any Pink Floyd, but lately I find myself thinking fondly about their music. The catalyst for this is twofold. First, there was their surprisingly vital Live8 performance. Then, there is YouTube, which of course contains a dizzying amount of Floyd ephemera. It is thanks to YouTube that I am constantly reminded of something very, very important.
Follow up:
Roger Waters' music blows.
It’s always been fairly de rigueur to lambaste the post-Waters Floyd as a tired nostalgia act and, yeah, I’m not about to beg for a critical upgrade of A Momentary Lapse of Reason either. But whereas David Gilmour at least had a grasp on both song structure and melodies that could make the most of his mellow but tonally assured singing, Waters used his solo career to highlight his didactic, hectoring lyrics with threadbare tunes and shrill vocals. Plus, he’d bring in a truckload of shit-hot session players whose gussying efforts only further highlighted how very weak these songs were. Waters was committing Rock Crimes.
All this might seem so very self-evident, so very “so fucking what.” I’ve felt the same all these years, but happening upon these long-forgotten Roger Waters videos, the train-wreck-enthusiast in me cannot help but watch.
To be even more completely unfair just to belabor my point, here is David Gilmour, performing a mostly solo acoustic version of an old Pink Floyd song. (If you’re not in the mood for extended acoustic noodling, fast-forward to 5:18.) Nevertheless, I maintain that this performance contains a surprising amount of feeling, humility and skill, and I’ve yet to find anything in Waters’ YouTube oeuvre that even begins to compare.
10 comments
I saw the Momentary Lapse tour and missed Roger Waters for like 3 seconds. They only did two songs from Lapse and they broke out all their classic stadium toys for the rest. They opened with Interstellar Overdrive and kicked its ass. Gilmour was amazing and to this day it is the only stadium show that was truly built for a stadim audience that I've ever seen or enjoyed.
Go get the classics man. If you feel dirty afterwards you can rinse with Mad Cap Laughs.
When does sentencing begin?
Here's a question for you and others, though: is the Blue Nile any better?
FS
I think I speak for many of us when I say...huh?
Mr. Mod, I'm afraid to even bother with sentencing, since that will involve dressing up like a worm or some such nonsense (a little Wall humor for you all).
And Fritz, if you're feeling brave, look for RW's What God Wants video. Jeff Beck plays guitar, but it blows all the same.
'Fraid I don't know enough about The Blue Nile to help you, though. But I thought they were just sleepy. Did they complain as much as he did?
Just to explain: I find both solo Roger Waters and all the Blue Nile I've ever heard to be uncommonly dreary, depressing, tuneless and not worth my time. And I *tried* to like the Blue Nile! That band falls under the "are you kidding me?!" category, as far as I'm concerned. I suppose there's probably something Deep and Important I'm missing. It all just seems like Rush for Mensa members to me.
Ah. It just seems an odd comparison to make.
I don't actually find the Blue Nile all that Deep and Important. They're more along the lines of a slightly artiser version of Prefab Sprout or Lloyd Cole and the Commotions in my eyes, and I don't much like them beyond their first album, and even then I like side one a lot more than side two.
Backstory alert: The Blue Nile's first album made a lot more sense to me after I learned that it was first recorded not as an album, but as a demo for a digital recording system. Among other things, this explains the exploded arrangements, where it's rare for all of the instruments in a song to be playing at the same time and there's a much greater than average use of silence.
Not that this would make you any more likely to enjoy the album...in fact, I would be hard pressed to imagine an album you're less likely to enjoy. But that doesn't mean you need to compare it to Roger Waters.
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