“I can’t worry about that”: The Pink Floyd albums Roger Waters called pretentious
Pink Floyd are arguably the most notorious prog rock band to have ever existed, and you can guarantee that they’re all reasonably satisfied with that position. Having produced a number of outstanding albums that work best when listened to as whole pieces, there was absolutely no need for them to ever pander to the singles market and put out hits when their strengths lay elsewhere. The masterpieces they created were meant to be consumed as a whole art piece, not as bite-sized snippets of what they had to offer.
The thing is, while their brand of prog, and the genre as a whole for that matter, was always inventive and relished in pushing the boundaries of rock, others will often take one look at the genre and perceive it as being a little pretentious and up itself. As far as the naysayers are concerned, there’s no need to draw a song out beyond the three-minute mark if you’ve got all the elements that make a good song lined up in front of you, and there’s certainly no need to make a convoluted concept that all of your songs have to fit around if you’ve truly got something to say.
These grand concepts, sprawling song structures that meander between sections and time signatures that need to be explained to anyone who has an aversion to music not in 4/4 are ultimately what put people off Pink Floyd, but it’s also what made them such an exciting group to so many others. You can’t take a song like ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ and shave 20 minutes off its runtime just to make it more catchy, you’ve got to digest it exactly as it is, else it loses its potency.
Still, the critics didn’t get in the way of the band experiencing astronomical levels of success, and while some of their later releases may not have landed with as much of a bang as their 1970s output, it didn’t diminish the impact that they still have as a group today. They’re widely regarded as brilliant, and for all the pretensions that they may have had, people can look beyond that. Everyone except Roger Waters, that is.
While he may have been responsible for penning some of their most complex material and coming up with large quantities of their highfalutin concepts, he was also one of his own worst critics, always revelling in the opportunity to slag his own work and his bandmates off. It might not be the best look to an outsider, but Waters is a man so staunch in his own opinions that you have to admire the lengths he will sometimes go to to sully his own brilliance.
In a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he reflected on his work with the band in typical fashion, rubbishing some of their most beloved output for being the pretentious tosh the haters have always claimed it to be. “Maybe my pretentions to grandeur are ill-founded,” Waters claimed. “However, in some way, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall were both pretentious and grand in their day.”
Despite this, he wasn’t completely tarnishing their reputation as classic albums, and he did acknowledge that he has to sometimes overlook the fact that people might call him pretentious for pursuing the most ambitious aspects of Pink Floyd’s musical adventures. “One of them 20 years later and the other 12 years later, they stand up, they’re good pieces of work. So I can’t worry about that.” Maybe he does see them as pretentious, but at least he still knows that he helped create magic on both occasions.
