Roger Waters and Pink Floyd: the Concept Albums (2015) Ronald C
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Roger Waters and Pink Floyd The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Communication Studies General Editor: Gary Radford, Department of Communication Studies, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey. The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Communication Studies publishes scholarly works in communication theory, practice, history, and culture. Recent Publications in Communication Studies Phil Rose, Roger Waters and Pink Floyd: The Concept Albums (2015) Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson (eds.), Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Alterity and the Other (2014) Pat Arneson, Communicative Engagement and Social Liberation: Justice Will Be Made (2014) Erik A. Garrett, Why Do We Go to the Zoo?: Communication, Animals, and the Cultural- Historical Experience of Zoos (2013) Philip Dalton and Eric Kramer, Coarseness in U.S. Public Communication (2012) Catherine Creede, Beth Fisher-Yoshida, and Placida Gallegos (eds.), The Reflective, Fa- cilitative, and Interpretive Practices of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (2012) Jolanta Aritz and Robyn C. Walker, Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communi- cation (2011) S. Alyssa Groom and J. M. H. Fritz, Communication Ethics and Crisis: Negotiating Differences in Public and Private Spheres (2011) R. C. MacDougall, Digination: Identity, Organization, and Public Life (2011) Deborah Eicher-Catt and Isaac E. Catt (eds.), Communicology: The New Science of Em- bodied Discourse (2010) Dan Cassino and Yesamin Besen-Cassino, Consuming Politics: Jon Stewart, Branding, and the Youth Vote in America (2009) On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress Roger Waters and Pink Floyd The Concept Albums Phil Rose FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Phil Rose All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rose, Phil, 1969- author. Roger Waters and Pink Floyd : the concept albums / Phil Rose. pages cm. -- (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press series in communication studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61147-760-3 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-1-61147-761-0 (electronic) 1. Waters, Roger--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Pink Floyd (Musical group) 3. Rock music-- History and criticism. I. Title. ML420.W25R67 2015 782.42166092'2--dc23 2014042038 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America To Ainsley, for all . and to my parents, Gordon and Barbara Rose—whose continued presence in the world the works here considered have helped me truly to appreciate and whose continued encouragement, support, and assistance are beyond thanks. “There are two ways of settling disputed questions: one by discussion, the other by force. The first being the characteristic of man, the second of brutes.” —Cicero “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” —Jesus Christ “The most fundamental value of art is that it can strip us of our selfish- ness and lend us tears for sorrows that are not our own.” —Oscar Wilde “The pessimists are right. But only the optimists change the world.” —Bertrand Blanchet, Bishop of Gaspésie, Québec Contents Preface xi Introduction 1 1 Dark Side of the Moon 13 2 Wish You Were Here 41 3 Animals 65 4 The Wall 89 5 The Final Cut: A Requiem for the “Post War Dream” 155 6 Amused to Death 191 Interview With Roger Waters: February 28, 1995 235 Works Cited and Consulted 245 Album Information 251 Index 257 About the Author 263 ix Preface As a younger person, I discovered the work of Pink Floyd and Roger Waters. Never before had I heard music that had been recorded with such distinct attention to sonic detail, nor had I heard rock songs that consistently contained such cleverly crafted and socially relevant lyrics. That the ideas presented in these songs were sustained throughout an entire album, however, was the trait that made them most intriguingly exceptional. For this illustrated something that, aside from the rare excep- tion, I had found notably absent from popular culture—namely, prolonged thought. In my youthful ebullience, I began to purchase books that had been written about the band and its work, but these volumes continuously disappointed me. None of them ever seemed to contain anything more than short and rather insufficient comments about the conceptual content of the recordings, and I had just begun to regard such knowledge as being essential for one to possess a deeper understanding and apprecia- tion of them. It was for this reason that I was first motivated to complete the present volume. Before I began to write, however, it was suggested to me that I not overlook in my study of these albums the significance of their musical and sonic aspects and how these also contribute to interpretations of the works’ overall meanings. At first, this seemed a strange idea, since my university’s music department had taught me that music essentially had no meaning—at least none that was “worth talking about” in relation to academic discussions of music. Rather, in the positivistic tradition of the highly influential nineteenth-century music critic Eduard Hanslick, our analytical attention ought to be directed simply toward “sounding forms in motion.” It did not take me long to decide that this clearly was an inaccurate and ideologically inflected belief and one that became more obviously so, as a result of the particular music with which I was deal- ing—a music whose lyrics, sound effects, imagery, and moving imagery, along with other elements of presentation and performance, cry out for audiences to consider all of these contributing elements within a holistic, integrated symbolic structure. Throughout the writing of this book, in fact, whether communicated through the choice of instrumentation, gen- re references, metrical shifts, or other musical processes, I was often truly startled to find out how richly meanings are encoded within this music if one takes the time to think about it. xi xii Preface I must admit that I have had reservations about including some of my observations in the body of this volume: this is solely the result of my inability to discuss some of these musical processes without requiring recourse to technical vocabulary, some of which will undoubtedly alien- ate many potential readers. This is likely true as well of my inclusion of occasional fragments of notated sheet music, which I use a number of times in the service of clarifying a particular musical aspect. I have en- deavored to keep such discussions as simple and succinct as possible, and I suspect that most queries about which can quickly be resolved with a brief web search. In the first section of the introduction, I provide the background nec- essary to understand the direction from which I approach my study of these recordings. This is a journey that takes them through the processes of academic musicology’s late-twentieth-century deconstruction and con- sequent reconstruction—processes largely undertaken through the influ- ence of insights drawn from various traditions of communication studies and related disciplines. This transformation emerged from a field dedi- cated primarily to formalist discussions of the sonic moving structures of Western art music—inspired by the close study of printed scores—to one more ready, willing, and able to address styles of music that have never been thus mediated, either because they were directly recorded or be- cause they derive from musical traditions that have neither composed nor preserved their music using techniques of notation, a definitive fea- ture of most of the world’s music cultures. The second section of the introduction discusses the evolution of the concept album and Roger Waters’s contribution to it, and the remainder of the book offers further insight into the complexity and profundity of these artistic pieces than what may have been previously apparent. That they can encourage and ultimately facilitate their listeners’ adoption of what has been called the “anthropological perspective,” or the ability to perceive one’s culture from both the inside and the outside, is perhaps their greatest attribute. It is one that becomes especially apparent in Wa- ters’s direct reference to the intellectual tradition known as media ecolo- gy, through the work of Neil Postman, with his third solo album, Amused to Death (1992). I should note also that the book has been written under the assumption that its readers have a strong familiarity with the record- ings in question. Therefore, they should familiarize themselves with them beforehand if they have not yet done so. If there is any kind of summary that can be made from my study of the content of these works, it is that their words and sounds work togeth- er to communicate one fundamental concern and one that is effectively articulated by the journalist Karl Dallas (1987)—they are all characterized by their “affirmation of human values against everything that conspires against them in life” (105); although this comment was made in relation to Dark Side of the Moon, it applies equally to the other recordings consid- Preface xiii ered. Notwithstanding Dallas’s useful formulation and the many other pertinent observations that he records and that I draw on here, his book is an exemplar of those that barely penetrate the surface of Waters’s work with the kind of systematic analysis that it requires.