The one genre Roger Waters was fed up with: “I hope that good work never goes out of fashion”
Whenever Roger Waters made music, it had to mean something more than the average pop song.
He liked the idea of making something that the world had never seen before, and even though the rest of Pink Floyd didn’t necessarily agree with everything he said, it’s not like he couldn’t make the best of every single concept he made with them once they started working on their masterpieces. But even though he felt that he could match whatever his bandmates were doing during his solo career, he only hoped that his songs would make people turn away from the other schlock on MTV.
Because even though Floyd’s visuals were perfect for the medium when they first debuted the animations of The Wall, Waters wasn’t exactly in love with the idea of MTV. The music videos did have huge potential as an artistic possibility, but since they quickly disintegrated into bands doing commercials for their own material, it’s not like Waters was going to be driving down the highway in silky threads like David Coverdale or anything.
His music needed to have a better package to go along with it, so it should have been a godsend to see people like Pearl Jam and Nirvana coming to the forefront. They were stripping things back down to basics every single time they made a video, but once the grunge wave died after Kurt Cobain’s death, that left a lot more room for the more juvenile brands of rock and roll to come forward.
Then again, it’s not like the 1990s suddenly stopped being great after 1994. The pop-punk explosion brought some phenomenal acts out of the woodwork, and the Britpop movement helped remind everyone of why bands from Waters’s generation worked so well. But when music started to veer towards bubble-gum pop all over again, Waters started to get more than a little bit pissed off.
It was one thing to have the more saccharine bands of the 1960s to compete with, but in that one dead zone in between the 1980s and 1990s, there were already bands like New Kids on the Block starting to take over the world. And with the rise of hip-hop becoming more and more prominent, Waters wasn’t about to say that he was exactly in love with the more superficial sides of MTV.
They might have made a lot more money, but when making the rounds for Amused to Death, Waters’s only hope was that his music would help snap kids out of what those other genres were doing, saying, “I hope that good work never goes out of fashion, and it even may be that people are fed up with teenagers with baseball hats on back to front and rappers talking over other people’s music, and there are a lot of people who will embrace this record and enjoy listening to it, enjoy the fact that there’s something challenging about it.”
And considering his strengths, it was probably for the best that Waters didn’t try to get with the times like everyone else was trying to do. He had already tried and failed to get digital on Radio KAOS, and even though Amused to Death has a lot of brilliant guest features, there was no reason for Waters to try his hand at rapping or bring in the kind of features that wouldn’t have felt out of place on a Madonna record.
He knew what he was good at, and since he had spent years building his songcraft, he wasn’t about to dumb his sound down to suit the new generation. He felt that there was a lot more that he could offer, and there was no way that he was going to get the fans’ attention by throwing on a backwards hat and spitting over a sample of ‘Echoes’.
