“That affects me”: The song Roger Waters said turned his stomach
The first lesson every musician should learn is that all their work is malleable. As much as they might think that they own the copyright to everything they’ve ever played, no one can own chords, and it’s not all that uncommon to see someone take the foundation of what they’ve listened to and come out with something completely different a few years down the road. It might get frustrating for people who take their art too seriously, but Roger Waters drew the line when he saw some of his colleagues’ work being taken out of context.
Because when listening to any kind of music, it’s important to recognise what the artist is at least trying to do with it. The true artists of the 1960s usually had an agenda when making some of their greatest songs, and when some people use them for the exact opposite message, it can either spark annoyance or outright anger in the fans.
And it’s not like Waters didn’t have a lot on his mind when he was making some of his finest records. While people can absent-mindedly sing along to ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ when Waters talks about not needing no education, the main crux of the problem has to do with where it fits in the confines of the story, especially when addressing the issues that take place to this day amongst domineering teachers.
He wasn’t even the only one willing to address the greater problems with the world, either. John Lennon had broken down barriers for what could be discussed in a rock song on Plastic Ono Band, and Bob Dylan had been rewriting the way that most people think about art in general in his music, but the minute that The Velvet Underground came out, most people didn’t realise what they were listening to.
If the hippies were talking about Flower Power and free love, Lou Reed was practically the inverse of that philosophy. The dream going on in San Francisco was as far away from the streets of New York as possible, and Reed himself was far more content to talk about the seedy side of Manhattan where people were as well-versed in poets as they were in heroin junkies.
“Marky Mark having a hit record with ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ was something that turned my stomach to a large degree and I don’t like that using of other peoples, mind you Lou Reed doesn’t seem to mind so why should I but there’s something about it that uh, that affects me.”
Roger Waters
So when painting that picture, the last thing that you want to see is a jock in the middle of things, and the minute that Waters heard Marky Mark’s song ‘Wildside’, he was absolutely disgusted, saying, “I hate the whole idea of sampling. You know, nothing is more loathsome, well there are more loathsome things but, well, Marky Mark having a hit record with ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ was something that turned my stomach to a large degree and I don’t like that using of other peoples, mind you Lou Reed doesn’t seem to mind so why should I but there’s something about it that uh, that affects me.”
While there’s no doubt that Mr Wahlberg certainly had some dark periods in his personal life, hearing Reed’s soft tune on this track feels wrong. If anything, ‘Can I Kick It’ by A Tribe Called Quest does a better job at interpolating the melody, especially since Q-Tip’s laid-back flow meshes well with the lackadaisical way that Reed sang the original version of the tune.
Although Waters’s stance on sampling has become a bit dated considering how many people incorporate it into their work now, he does make a good point about the tasteful way to use someone else’s work. It’s one thing to get the basis of a song together, but if it’s all done in service to a sample that doesn’t complement the words, there’s no real point in fleshing it out.
