The instrument Roger Waters thought made rock and roll cheap: “You don’t want to listen”
Rock and roll is perhaps the genre that has evolved more and at a faster pace than any other facet of music. It’s exciting to some, but also a little disgruntling for a man like Roger Waters.
As part of a band like Pink Floyd, who were built so heavily on the more classic fundamentals of psychedelia and experimentalism, Waters was far more used to a sonic landscape in which his imagination was allowed to run its most wild. But, of course, things were bound to change over time, and perhaps sooner than he would have liked, the wheels of the industry moved on towards technological innovation over free spirits.
The whole case in point within this can be found in the stark contrast between the musical tropes of the 1970s, compared to the 1980s. On one hand, the former decade was defined by progressive rock and darker lyrical portraits, whereas ten years later, things had swung in favour of synths and shinily synthetic songs. This is not to say that one is more advanced or greater than the other, because they both undeniably changed the face of music as we know it today, but it’s clear Waters has a favourite.
In a 1992 interview, Waters was forthright in making this derision more than evident, as he bemoaned, “I’m very bored with drum machines, you know, if I hear another record that goes ‘woom-woom-tick-wa-tong-kung-ka-tick’, I’ll think to myself, ‘the problem with these things is, that it makes it very easy for people to make something that sounds like a record’. This is like a facsimile of a piece of rock and roll, very easily.”
Essentially, to him, being able to plug in one instrument and create an entire record from start to finish, all from the comfort of your desktop, was child’s play compared to the painstaking efforts of the likes of The Dark Side of the Moon. A seismic achievement in rock music like that completely swamped something cultivated out of a synthesiser, at least in his own outlook on the industry.
“You are going to the shop, you buy a Roland, you bring it home, and you plug it in, and then you can make records,” he claimed, “And if you speak over them then that’s a rap record. What you produce is stuff that has an attraction, but you don’t want to listen to the next day. Well, I don’t.” That may be the operative point here, the rise of the synth was the downfall of rock simply in his opinion, and perhaps not in the rest of the world. Well, not quite.
When Waters made those comments back in 1992, the musical canon was only on the cusp of the advent of Britpop, so it’s difficult to know how the Pink Floyd visionary’s mind shifted in response to the renewal of guitar rock that then came. Sure, it was still nothing like the sound his band created back in the day, but it was certainly a complete pivot on synths. If one thing’s clear, though, the Roland was the unfortunate victim of the Waters’ wrath.
