Quote:
Originally Posted by VonMagnum
Given all that court action for the name of "Pink Floyd" we got a whopping TWO albums after that from Gilmour and company that weren't total cash grabs (live albums, box sets and rereleases), I find all the in-fighting ridiculous.
I could point to Roger's Radio KAOS and Amused To Death albums as being every bit as good overall (I'd take Momentary Lapse over KAOS slightly and Amused to Death over The Division Bell by a wide margin, although I think "High Hopes" was one of their best songs).
"Pink Floyd" is obviously Waters + Gilmour. They could make a good album today even, but they won't over egotistical BS and neither is as good on their own as they were together. I don't want to disparage Nick Mason or Richard Wright (RIP), but they weren't the real creative talents behind Pink Floyd, especially by the DSOTM era. Syd Barrett's Floyd was very interesting, but it died a quick death when he burned his brain out with drugs.
Ultimately, Pink Floyd hasn't had any real new material of any value since 1994 (some would say 1979, although I personally liked The Final Cut, but it really was more of a Pink Floyd plays Roger's first solo album in many respects).
It's just kind of sad because mainstream rock music seems like it's long dead (Nirvana was the beginning of the end, I think), but that's largely the music industry's fault by pushing looks (pop stars) over music and programmed computer music over real song writers and lets face it, hip-hop and rap over rock music.
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Well, all this has nothing to do with blu-ray but here's my two cents:
The general impression that only waters and Gilmour (usually in that order) matter is very simplistic. It is based on only being able to appreciate music by reading the album credits.
As a native Spanish speaker, it always called my attention that in English songs are "written"and music is "composed". We don't have that distinction in Spanish, everything is composed. So what's the deal? The writing of the song is merely the bones over which the body is built. You can argue that you cannot stand on your feet if you have no bones but bones alone do not constitute a body.
So, if one is incapable of recognising musicianship by the act of listening, one reads the credits and announces "waters did everything" because Mr waters made sure of controlling what the credits said (to the extent that Nick Mason's name does not appear anywhere on Wish You Were Here, or Rick Wright's on Animals, even though their contributions were bigger than, say, Dick Parry's).
If you listen to the members' solo albums, you'd be hard pressed to recognise anything Floydian in Mr waters' output. Pros and Cons sounds like the solo bits in The Wall/The Final Cut, which is not the same as sounding like Floyd. The less said about Radio Kaos, an album that I was forced to endure repeatedly during my teen years due to my father's complet lack of musical ear, the better. All I'll say is that any Floyd fan who likes that album, likes it because of the name roger waters printed on the cover. They were conditioned to give it a chance before the needle ever reached the vynil because it's such an ordinary, uninspired and unprogressive album that if the cover said Peter Matthews or whatever, they'd have dismissed it as 80's trash.
In a recent interview, Nick said that Rick was the most underrated member of Floyd and it is because he was perceived as minor as a writer. A far cry from the likes of Emerson or Wakeman, Rick's contributions are vital to the Floyd sound, not just at the beginning of the band but throughout their history. Even Mason's. I cannot find another drummer whose patterns are so integral to the structures of the songs. It is because the music was composed by Pink Floyd. Check it out, it says so in the credits of the early albums.
If you still think waters was the genius behind the band, listen to his demos and ask yourself if you would have bought the albums if they had sounded like that. If you can find his demo for Time (used to be on youtube), you will recognise the lyrics (typically people without a musical ear take refuge analyzing the lyrics as they can be "understood" while music can't) and a ghost of the melody we know. If he hadn't bumped into Rick and Nick, waters would've never gravitated towards music and his main interest would've continued to be motorbikes.
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