(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 13 May 2025 20:12, UK
Being a rock and roll musician doesn’t always mean having the most refined palette when it comes to other genres of music. This was designed to be music to piss people off, and that didn’t always cater to playing nice when working with people who didn’t fall into one’s musical jurisdiction. And when it came to people like Roger Waters, it didn’t take long for him to realise when he loved something or if certain types of music were the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
But listening to Pink Floyd, it didn’t seem like too much was off the table for them to do. There are countless musicians that think any music other than rock and roll is nothing but noise and screaming half the time, but since Floyd came up with tunes like ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, noise and screaming weren’t exactly the worst thing in the world as long as they were used in the right context.
And listening back to their records, there are pieces that paved the way for what progressive rock was going to be. ‘Echoes’ surpasses many of the finest side-long epics that other prog acts make, and while Waters wasn’t the first person to make his own version of a rock opera, he certainly perfected the medium when he came up with the premise for The Wall. But as much as he liked it, not every musician liked the idea of making concept records.
Sometimes it was better to make an album with nothing but a selection of really good tracks, even if they didn’t have any overarching narrative. And while Floyd flirted with that style when ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ hit the charts with a disco rhythm, there was another genre being born from the era of leisure suits and disco balls on the East Coast.
Right as the 1970s morphed into the 1980s, rap was starting to become a prominent force in the music industry, whether the rock and roll fans liked it or not. Some of the biggest names of the late 1980s like Guns N’ Roses were quickly being trailed by bands like NWA from Compton, but if Waters barely had time to keep up with modern music at the start of the decade, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with any form of hip-hop once he reached the 2000s.
When talking about his musical taste to Mojo, Waters felt that the entire hip-hop scene was pointless, 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.” Granted, it’s entirely possible that Waters may have been looking in the wrong places when painting with that broad of a brush.
It’s not only possible but quite likely that someone who listened to bands like The Beatles and The Band probably weren’t going to be that interested in a 50 Cent record, but looking at the experimental hip-hop coming out of MF Doom or even the militant sounds coming out of Public Enemy in the late 1980s would have been more up his alley, since ‘Fight the Power’ had one of the most significant impacts any rap act could ask for in the mainstream.
Waters has every right to like what he likes and dislike what he doesn’t, but let this be a public service announcement to those who feel that they should discount an entire genre by listening to only its most popular artists. It’s easy to simply pull one’s headphones out if they hear something they don’t like after 20 seconds, but the true music fans are those who sit with a song and see the merits behind it before making a final judgment call.
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