“It was a construct to sell records”: the band Roger Waters said had no meaning
There are normally two schools of thought amongst rock fans when talking about the idea of progressive music. Either the genre was a bold new innovation that helped expand the palette of what the genre was capable of, or it was the moment that marked when rock and roll crawled up its own ass until the punk movement showed up to wipe out everything that people had started working on. Although Roger Waters might have a hand in one of the biggest prog acts of all time, that wasn’t exactly how he thought of his music.
Because, really, Pink Floyd was about expanding in terms of musical structure rather than focusing on scale exercises. That was reserved for bands like Yes, and while there were certainly complex moments to be found in Floyd’s catalogue, a lot of what Waters did was about taking the crux of his lyrics and marrying them with the kind of melodies that were slightly off-kilter compared to what the 1960s counterculture had been doing.
And at the same time, it’s not like every one of their tunes was hard to play. A band like Rush was always going to be difficult for any bar band to tackle, but listening to the way that David Gilmour sings along to ‘Fat Old Sun’ or Waters painted lush pictures of greed on ‘Money’, the songs themselves were usually fairly easy to get under one’s fingers once they had their bearings.
That’s because Waters prioritised soul in music before anything else. Many rock and roll acts came up in his wake, focused on making rock and roll movements on the same level as classical music, but as far as Waters was concerned, none of them seemed to matter if all they were looking to do was make tunes that made music connoisseurs stroke their chins in appreciation.
“That wasn’t about anything… it was a construct in order to sell records. It didn’t have its roots in somebody’s passionate belief in human life.”
Roger Waters
It’s not like a band with chops like Yes was the only one. King Crimson were known for creating bold new approaches to what rock and roll could be, but when looking at the proper height of the genre, it didn’t get much more technical than what Emerson, Lake and Palmer were doing, taking everything complex about the genre and finding ways to turn it on its head on albums like Tarkus.
Waters had made blinding epics on the same level as ‘Tarkus’, but he knew that he was better off not being compared to anything ELP did, saying, “That wasn’t about anything… it was a construct in order to sell records. It didn’t have its roots in somebody’s passionate belief in human life. It had its roots in wanting to be successful in pop music in the 1970s.”
Granted, it’s hard to believe that a band so focused on being complex and making strange time signature changes within their songs was aching for a hit. They had singles like ‘Lucky Man’ that worked well on the charts, but looking at their core studio albums, it’s no wonder a band like Jethro Tull would release an album like Thick as a Brick solely to make fun of that kind of writing.
Waters was known to be a bit self-serious about some of his greatest tunes, but when he went after a band like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, it was about more than not caring for their music. He stood up for what he believed were the virtues that rock and roll should always remember.
