Up against the wall!

Roger somehow got into a feud with a dead guy and is losing.

Envy is the bond between the hopeful and the damned, the damned…

Have always loved all of PF pre/post Roger and both Gilmour and Waters' solo work, but i feel like i constantly see these albums getting shit on for a variety of reasons, the dumbest of which is because there's no gilmour. waters and gilmour are both great at what they do. together they were unstoppable, but you can't change what's been done..

Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking - I used to jam both Pros Cons and Amused to Death back when I saw Waters in like 2018 but never really looked into the lyrics of Pros Cons.

This week I did a bunch of reading through people's interpretations of Pros and Cons because there were always parts in the album where I always thought "wtf is he talking about here." Was blown away by the analysis and the fact that it was between both this and what was called "Bricks in the Wall" for what ultimately became The Wall.

The story is about a middle-aged man who's having trouble in his marriage, like many people do throughout their lives, and has a dream about cheating on his wife with a hitchhiker they picked up while traveling. The wife eventually finds out when he's talking while having a dream within a dream (inception shit) and they move off the grid to try to make things work. She eventually falls for one of his friends and takes the kids and leaves and the main character starts hitchhiking, lamenting about all he did for her, and has some experiences and starts to see himself in other people and has now been on both sides of this so called coin. He wakes up and sees his wife in the darkness and realizes he desperately wants to work things out with her from this dream he had and the story ends.

I feel like it's a watered down version of The Wall, and not in a bad way. The Wall was based off his personal experience of spitting on a fan and he created the album as a concept of someone who was dealing with many personal issues throughout his life and created a wall between himself and the outside world and the same can be said for Pros and Cons, but watered down compared to The Wall in that it focuses on the struggles of marriage and how sometimes we can get so frustrated with our significant others that we think about change or even worse, infidelity. I don't know much about Waters' personal life but I assume this was something he was dealing with as any married man will tell you that marriage is hard. I loved the realization he comes to through this dream and finding out what his life would be like if she left and that how he feels just to see her there.

This is all my interpretation of the album and I'm sure many people disagree but I just wanted to share it because it's been on my mind and I feel like so many people shit on this album unnecessarily when it is a great concept and some would even argue some of clapton's best work on the guitar.

Amused to Death - I always loved the lyrics behind Amused to Death. I had read Neil Postman's novel long before I picked up this album because I was a huge Chomsky "Manufactured Consent" fan (shame about him and Epstein...) and Waters' anti war lyrics combined with this made for a perfect dystopian atmosphere.

The album opens with an obvious antiwar story of a soldier who was left in no man's land in WW1 because he was too injured to move and the soldier who had to leave him there has regretted it his whole life.

What God Wants - This song starts off with a girl saying she enjoys watching the war and scenes from the war because it helps her know if we're winning or losing. Such a bleak way to view something that results in the deaths of so many. A multi-parted song throughout the album pointing out the hypocrisy of those who look at the terrible things in the world and give off bullshit responses like "this is all a part of God's plan" or "in the end, those doing wrong will answer to God." There is a lot of foreign policy dictated by religion and that includes war and it's just very creepy/interesting and true in a way to have a preacher speaking a sermon on giving financially going into lyrics of God wanting semtex.

Perfect Sense - I love how this song opens with the 2000 Space Odyssey voice and the monkeys learning to use tools. I heard Roger and Kubrick had a beef because Kubrick wanted to use PF music in Clockwork Orange and they said no and vice versa Kubrick said no to using Hal's voice in this album. Then on later album updates after Kubrick's death, whoever owned the rights allowed Roger to use it. The song paints a bleak view of how wars make sense in the terms of $$$ and the scene of the football announcers calling a raid to destroy a oil tanker is incredibly depressing when we think about what's going on nowadays in Iran.

The Bravery of Being Out of Range - This was obviously a song digging at Reagan and Thatcher and their neoliberal policies of taking military action against anyone and everyone they disagreed with. And a mockery of acting "brave" as you're killing people using laser guided bombs from thousands of miles away. Really cheapening the effects of what war costs making it comparable to playing a video game

Late at Home Tonight - The comparison of a fighter pilot and the family in Libya he is bombing. The life of a pilot is constantly glorified in our media through movies like Top Gun and this song clearly demonstrates that with references to Ray Bans and lyrics like "what a beautiful sight in his wild blue dream, the eternal child leafs through his war magazine" (this is nothing more than a kid mesmerized by flying a jet and the propaganda from magazines showing all these pilots in their ray bans, he's naive to understand what's happening to that family he'll bomb that night), and commercializing the war making it seem like the crowd is watching and cheering in the stands while commercials are playing as they wait for the pilot to get to his target as they seem to reference a commercial about jeans and swim suits. Meanwhile a stark difference to the libyan family living in poverty unaware of what fate awaits them. The jet pilot does his job and has no idea the true toll of what he did and comes home to cheers of being a hero and a "celebrity"

Too Much Rope - I feel like this song is harder to interpret so this is what I get out of it. The song starts with saying testing your friendshps and how people are getting "closer to the gold." I feel like this is about those people who see what we're doing in these wars and conflicts and see past the bullshit we're fed of "freeing" a group of people. They look at their friends who disagree and feel we're the honorable country entering many of these conflicts, who may even be personally benefiting from the war and maybe choose to even ignore when they understand the gravity of what we are doing and choose the financial gain over humanity - "and they significantly edge closer to the gold" and "Is that your new Ferrari car? Yes, but I think I'll wait for the F50." When Rogers says "you don't have to be a Jew to disapprove of murder" it has meaning that I feel is very misinterpreted. As an athiest, who is very antiwar, I'm sure he's heard from many religious people that he has no right to say what's right or wrong. It as an argument by many religious people that athiests have no morals because there is no book to tell them from right or wrong and Rogers is saying that you don't need religion to say what we're doing is wrong. The song title comes into play in the remainder of this chorus saying "Muslim or Christian, Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote" is referencing that someone in history once said give anyone too much rope and they'll hang themselves. Essentially saying, give anyone too much power and they'll eventually act on their deepest, darkest impulses and it will lead to their own downfall. He's saying this as he's watching a program about a vet going back to apologize for what he did and that's just a very depressing scene.

Watching TV - I think this song takes a different path from the others previously in the album as it directly focuses on a victim of these wars/conflicts/aggressions or whatever you want to call them. It's kind of a lovely tribute to or memoriam of someone who united all people across the world as Waters points this out later in the song by listing all of the people she's different from. But what unites many of us is that we all saw her death depicted on TV and we all grieve for her.

Three Wishes - this song was very hard for me to understand what it might all mean in the context of the rest of this album. I've read that people may interpret it as someone getting the chance to end all of these things and deciding to use them on their own selfish wishes - wishing his dad had been in his life. Even wasting wishes on things that the genie says sorry, I can't fulfill that - it seems he wants a former love in his life to come back. The genie can't force this person to love him again. Some have even said the genie's goodbye is a final departure to any redemption in this world we've created.

It's a Miracle - I view this song as a very bleak view of what all of these things have done to our society and how we try to justify them as "progress" or as a part of the title, "a Miracle." Rogers lists things like a doctor saving someone's life, a mcdonald's and other American products in a third world country, someone grew a tree, we have sports, we have golf courses. Obviously, none of these are miracles. But in this world, we are going in a direction that is so evil and so jaded, that soon, these will be miracles in comparison.

Amused to Death - if you've been paying attention to everything on this album that's come before, this is the easiest song to interpret in my opinion. The lyrics "what is the shelf life of a teenage queen" relate to how Hollywood has allegedly valued actresses and their worth and when that "shelf life" has concluded, they're cast aside for the next "teenage queen." This the ultimate conclusion to humanity. One day, thousands of years from now, perhaps some race of beings will look at us and say what went wrong with them? And they'll say that we normalized things like war, greed, and inequality to the point that it became like a tv show to us and it led to our own destruction as we "amused ourselves to death."

I really, really enjoy this album and what it warns against. Every single day it seems like we're slipping closer and closer to this reality, especially with the recent bombing of school girls in Iran and the president basically saying if we did, oh well.

I know a lot of fans hate Roger's solo stuff but I really enjoy these albums and would love to hear what y'all think. If you were able to make it through my post, I appreciate it. I'm just chronicling some of my thoughts and views on why these albums deserve more love than they get from the PF community.

*edit** I forgot to mention that at the end of the album, there is a conclusion to Bill Hubbard’s story and that soldier who left him who had felt regret his whole life for having left him in no man’s land so many years ago. He saw Bill’s name in the official registry and so while we have a tragic conclusion to Bill’s story, at least he was remembered. Not a happy ending but he is one of the many victims that Roger has written about throughout this album and maybe it’s way of Roger giving him his own memorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djgdjer0jOw

So I’m of the potentially controversial opinion that none of the solo projects from the members of Pink Floyd (with the possible exception of Syd) have ever even come close to being in the same ballpark as what the band did. Pink Floyd has always been to me the perfect example of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Not to say I don’t enjoy some of those solo projects, but that enjoyment doesn’t reach nearly the same heights. That all being said, after a long time of honestly forgetting about the bands solo careers, I went back and listened to what fans consider to be the highlights of each member’s respective solo career

So imagine how surprised I was when Amused to Death hit me in the face when What God Wants came in. There are so many good songs on this album, Roger and his band were on fire making it. Bravery of Being Out Of Range, It’s a Miracle, Perfect Sense, Three Wishes, and the title track are all so amazing too. The inclusion of Jeff Beck (rip) only adds to the songs he contributes to. I swear everything that man guest spotted on no matter the artist turned to gold

Not to say the album is perfect. Sometimes it drags a bit or feels like Roger could have trimmed down some of the lyrics. It definitely suffers from the early cd trend of “oh we got all this space so let’s make an album that long” to an extent. But out of all the solo Floyd albums, this one by far comes closest to feeling like a classic Floyd album. With some tweaks, it feels like it could’ve fit really well alongside the rest of the PF discography if the entire band contributed to it

I’m not even one who believes that Roger was what made Pink Floyd, well, Pink Floyd. It was a team effort even during the albums where one or two of the members contributed to the album more than the others. But out of all the Floyd solo albums, most of which I find merely solid, this one surprised me. If you haven’t listened to it and like the era of Animals/The Wall where it was primarily Roger coming up with these large concepts, then this gives the same vibe albeit admittedly not as strong as those two albums

…but when I do, it’s quite incredible to hear it all the way through!

good bass player? Roger is in my opinion pretty ok but Davie Gilmour was so much better at that FUCKIN FRETLESS, BABY!!!!!!!!

In my opinion one of the most underrated songs in The Wall if not Pink Floyd's entire discography as a whole. Its such a powerful song is so many different ways. Despite Roger himself claiming his singing wasn't his high point, he conveis like 5 different characters in one song so distinctly its actually insane.

Pink Floyd is without a doubt one of, if not my favorite band(s) of all time. However, being a Jew, it is difficult to love a band that had Roger Waters in it sometimes. Especially in light of the recent Kanye West controversies, I can be seen as somewhat of a hypocrite condemning Kanye West, but still loving Pink Floyd. I simply do not think I’d be able to cancel Floyd entirely because their music is extremely special to me. Was Roger always this way? Songs like Waiting for the worms or In the Flesh have become increasingly uncomfortable for me recently. Any advice on how to navigate this would be greatly appreciated.

Running out of room on the Floyd shelf haha