The one genre Roger Waters couldn’t bear listening to: “Violent and sexist”
Roger Waters didn’t really want to be put in a box every single time he made a new record.
Pink Floyd was already meant to test the boundaries of what a band could do at the top of the charts, so the idea of putting parameters on everything they did would have been silly for them to even entertain when they were first starting to make genuine masterpieces in the early 1970s. No one wanted to hear the sequel to Dark Side of the Moon, but Waters knew not every innovation had to be for the better every single time he made a record.
If anything, there were more than a few times when he felt like the psychedelic movement was already too much for him to take. The acid-soaked sounds of their early years were serviceable for the time, but Waters wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life trying to make songs that sounded good to get stoned to. He had a lot more to work with, and that meant going outside the norms whenever he made his own music.
Granted, not every experiment was a success, and there’s no shortage of footage where both Waters and David Gilmour talk about Atom Heart Mother being a massive failure in their eyes, but if there was one thing Waters was good at, it was lyrics. His dissections of the human condition were absolutely perfect for their time when he started making tracks like ‘Echoes’, but when he began to take a more political stance on albums like Amused to Death, he hoped that it would be a respite from what he was hearing out of the likes of Dr Dre.
Then again, the hip-hop community was only doing another version of reporting as the giants of yesteryear had done. It wasn’t folk music by any means, but when looking at the way that NWA used samples in their music, they were giving their fans a kaleidoscope of different sounds that reflected the kind of life that they were living every single day. But the materialistic side of things was what Waters wasn’t all that keen.
Despite having his own strengths as a lyricist and even taking a few cues from rap, Waters felt that everything gangsta-rap stood for wasn’t for him, saying, “I am aware of guys like Eminem, and some of his ideas are interesting, but I can’t take the gangsta hip hop stuff, which is violent and sexist. Funnily enough, yesterday I was working on my new album and I realised I’d done something very rap-like – just two minutes of me talking over a drum-loop to help glue the narrative together – so I suppose there has been an influence on me from rap.”
While that does put him in the conglomerate of music fans that claim that any hip-hop music that isn’t the one white guy is bad, that doesn’t seem to be Waters’s intention. He simply didn’t know the kind of experience that those people were drawing from, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn about that kind of music every now and again.
After all, his newest albums are examples of him making more spoken-word passages throughout the songs, and since he has a lot to say, many of his tunes do have a hip-hop angle to them whether he knows it or not. But given the way that he is speaking, Waters seems to be going more for a Tom Waits delivery than anything that he heard out of someone like Snoop Dogg.
Then again, it’s probably for the best that most of the members of Floyd stay far away from hip-hop whenever they can. It’s one thing to try new things every now and again, but even if Waters took what he could from that kind of music, Gilmour at least had the good sense of being talked out of rapping on A Momentary Lapse of Reason back in the day.
