The “protest” singer Roger Waters called “the best rock”
Roger Waters had a lot more on his mind than traditional rock and roll when he formed Pink Floyd.
He loved the idea of moving in different directions every single time he made a new record, and when he realised that he wasn’t getting what he wanted out of the rest of the band, it didn’t take him long to start looking for new approaches to rock and roll that weren’t exactly traditional. He was taking a lot more chances than other people were willing to go, but everything that his idols did was about challenging people.
If he had continued playing psychedelic music as he had done in the days of Syd Barrett, it would have never worked. Barrett was the one responsible for turning those songs into solid gold, and when he was no longer able to work on those projects, Waters needed time to think about where he was going to go. He didn’t have the same chops that Barrett did, but the best way for them to make classics was by working together.
‘Echoes’ was a masterpiece because it showcased everything that the band was capable of in their peak, but Waters saw it as an opportunity to branch out into different lyrical ideas. There was still that space rock sound that was populating most of their songs around that time, but there was no way for him to go wrong if he started writing about the relationships between mankind.
The world was going to relate to something that sounded natural, and that meant Waters turning his voice up when talking about his own troubles. Most people didn’t necessarily know about the troubles that he was going through when warning musicians of making it big on ‘Welcome to the Machine’, but it wasn’t like Waters wasn’t saying anything that millions of people before him wouldn’t have said.
After all, music is supposed to be a legitimate form of protest, and a lot of what Waters was doing was about trying to continue in the long line of musicians meant to disrupt the system. He had no interest in being a dancing puppet for the rest of his life, and a lot of his greatest moments came from him going back to the original protest songs that had kicked everything off before rock and roll was even invented.
The early rock and rollers could cause a ruckus back in the day, but Waters was much more attuned to what someone like Leadbelly was doing, saying, “I’ve just never been consumed by popular music. I mean I was turned on by Elvis like everyone else, but my interest goes right back to the early part of the 20th century, back to Leadbelly, back to the first protest songs on the edge of the blues which is where the best of rock and roll still lives. We haven’t moved far, really.”
And you can really draw a straight line from Leadbelly to every other songwriter with something to say. Woody Guthrie was doing the same thing with an acoustic guitar in his hands, but throughout music history, you can hear Leadbelly’s influence in everyone willing to turn their voice up, whether that was Bob Dylan’s political tunes, Neil Young’s defiance to the music industry, Chuck D rallying against authority or even Kurt Cobain pushing against the corporate side of rock.
Every one of them had something to say, so while conservatives might be pissed every single time that someone utters the word ‘woke’ for being too progressive, Leadbelly was out there proving that the idea of ‘wokeness’ has been going on for as long as people have seen injustices in the world and sworn to do something about it.
