I don’t hate1 Roger Waters’s re-recording of Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic “Money”:
The jazzy arrangement is interesting, and although I wish Waters would sing,2 the spoken-word poetry in the song’s instrumental section, taking the place of David Gilmour’s stinging guitar work, is enjoyable. I always thought Waters had a way with words. Still, although I’m intrigued to hear the rest of this project, Dark Side of the Moon Redux, when it’s released this fall, the overriding question in my mind is
WHY?
Why retread old ground, especially something as flawless as Dark Side of the Moon which needs not a single note or word changed?
Sure, Waters has offered his explanation . . .
. . . It’s not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable. But it is a way for the seventy nine year old man to look back across the intervening fifty years into the eyes of the twenty nine year old and say, to quote a poem of mine about my Father, “We did our best, we kept his trust, our dad would have been proud of us”. And also it is a way for me to honor a recording that [Pink Floyd drummer] Nick [Mason] and [Pink Floyd keyboardist] Rick [Wright] and [Pink Floyd guitarist] Dave [Gilmour] & I have every right to be proud of.
. . . and that’s all well and good, but it speaks to a broader problem that I’m sure that all creatives need to face as they age: what are we doing this for?
Let’s take a look at Waters’s recorded output: after appearing on Pink Floyd’s first twelve albums (1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to 1983’s The Final Cut) as bassist, singer, songwriter and lyricist,3 Waters has since put out four albums of original material in 1984, 1987, 1992, and 2017, a take on Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale in 2018, and an album of re-recorded songs called The Lockdown Sessions in 2022. So from 1992 to 2017, Waters put out one collection of new stuff—that hit number 3 in the UK and number 11 in the US!—and a bunch of, essentially, covers, or whatever you call covering yourself.
What has he been doing in the meantime? Why, touring around playing old Pink Floyd songs, of course!
For a man with a lot to say politically—and I argue that along with Morrissey, Roger Waters is the last of the intellectually consistent and fearless rock stars whether or not you agree with him—he hasn’t had a lot to say artistically. Sure, playing The Wall in its entirety in Berlin shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall was clever and somewhat profound, despite The Wall being a tale of one man’s descent into madness and not the Cold War. But it didn’t break any new ground.
I find this incredibly ironic, as Waters, upon notifying the public earlier this year that he was re-recording Dark Side of the Moon, had this to say about his former bandmates:
Waters went on to explain that his main problem with his former bandmates was that they couldn’t write material. “Well, Nick [Mason] never pretended,” he qualified, adding, “But [David] Gilmour and Rick [Wright]? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.”
What is it that makes such formerly opinionated and impassioned people lose the ability to come up with new ideas? Is Roger freaking Waters, the man behind Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut truly so bereft of ideas he has to take shots at members of a band he left forty years ago and re-record said band’s career-defining album? For a man who has such well-articulated opinions about the state of the world, he doesn’t seem interested in translating it into art.
Topical art doesn’t have to take the form of dour political screeds set to music.4 What about tapping into the deep wells of emotion that characterized the best of Pink Floyd’s music, that universalizing of the intensely personal and specific that made songs like “Wish You Were Here,” “Comfortably Numb,” and “Us and Them” soar? Were Gilmour, Wright, and Mason actually more important that Waters like to admit?
Who cares, really. This isn’t a post about Pink Floyd.
There is a danger, a fear, that I think is more prevalent among men but I might be wrong, that growing older means mellowing out. Losing that fire in the belly, that appetite to take risks and ruffle feathers, to get in fights and to be bold. To put to words the thoughts that everyone else thinks and wishes they could say but is too timid, too cowed by the prospect of losing a job or friends. To have something to say.
There is truth to this fear. At some point, we weary of the battle and want nothing more than to sit back and enjoy our remaining days in relative leisure and let the young try to wrestle the world into submission. To rest on our laurels—and Roger Waters has some very expensive laurels to plant his English keister on.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. For every artist you can think of who either gave up or peddled in rehashed glory, I can think of one whose late-career work is just as good, and maybe better, than the stuff produced as youngsters. Rush’ Clockwork Angels (2012) is one of the best things they ever produced,5 hinting at new directions after forty years of making music that were sadly cut short by drummer/lyricist Neil Peart’s 2020 death by brain cancer. English rock mainstays Blur just put out an album called The Ballad of Darren which, much like their first reunion album, 2015’s The Magic Whip, is just as good, as immediate, and real as 1992’s Modern Life is Rubbish6—not bad for a band approaching 40 years as a going concern. Even relative youngers Queens of the Stone Age, deep into their third decade, just dropped In Times New Roman . . . a few months back, which has a vigor not heard since their breakthrough Songs for the Deaf (2002).
And it’s not just music. Umberto Eco kept writing until his death. Ditto Cormac McCarthy. Thomas Pynchon doesn’t write at a feverish pace, but he still writes, as do Neil Stephenson and—and may God Himself forgive me for uttering this man’s accursed name in this post—Stephen King. Whether you like their later works, or agree with what they’re trying to say, is irrelevant. What matters is that they’re still there in the trenches, working their art.
The dancer slows her frantic pace
In pain and desperation
Her aching limbs and downcast face
Aglow with perspirationStiff as wire, her lungs on fire
With just the briefest pause
The flooding through her memory
The echoes of old applause.She limps across the floor
And closes her bedroom door...The writer stare with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rageThirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecisionAnd he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no moreSome are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we'd like to beSadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee
The bell tolls forFor you the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee . . .
The bell tolls for thee . . .Rush, “Losing It”
But it’s not as facile as “Some people got it, some people don’t.” Everyone is different. Some do burn brightly while young and end up burning themselves out, while others can maintain a controlled level of fire across the years. Nobody knows why this is, and I don’t think we ever will. I mean, to be fair to Roger Waters, it’s not as if David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason continued to release work at a torrid pace post-Floyd.
Which, in the final analysis, is perfectly fine. Maybe someone only has one novel in them, or one movie, or one piece of music . . . and they knock it out of the park. Maybe some artists don’t have tons to say and they wisely decide to pursue other interests. Others, it seems, don’t think that the thing they said while young was the final word—we see this with, say, George Lucas tweaking his Star Wars trilogy, or even the great Frank Zappa re-recording certain parts of some of his earlier albums with the Mothers of Invention. Mary Shelley famously redid Frankenstein in 1831, over ten years after its initial publication in 1818. The master J.R.R. Tolkien revised his works—that’s not the original you’ve been reading all these years. F. Scott Fitzgerald had sent Trimalchio to his publisher who was getting ready to print when he stopped the presses and presented a new version, titled The Great Gatsby.
This is scratching the surface of a long and venerable tradition of artists refusing to leave their great works alone. It’s not like these legends had nothing new to say; I see it more of them wanting to make sure that what they wanted to say gets through in a purer form than what was initially released.
The more I thin about Dark Side of the Moon Redux, the more it seems that Waters felt that the original album was a book missing its final chapter. Perhaps he still has something to say, just not in a way that his fans were expecting. That continued willingness to throw curveballs, I think, is worthy of respect and in and of itself says volumes.
Lots to say in The Swordbringer trilogy. Buy Book 1, The Last Ancestor, here.
I don’t love it either. It’s interesting, and I’ll leave it at that.
If he even can still sing anymore.
Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and therefore did not appear on the band’s final three albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994), and The Endless River (2014).
This is the main criticism levied at most of Waters’s solo work.
No joke: this album is so good if they released it in 1981 instead of Moving Pictures, it would be their career-defining disc.
Obviously, Parklife (1994) is their best album, but it, like 1996’s excellent The Great Escape features a little too much winking distance and post-modern irony between singer/songwriter Damon Albarn and the subjects of his songs—he’s a wryly distant observer instead of a participant and some of the emotion gets lost. With The Magic Whip and especially The Ballad of Darren some of the warmth that defined Modern Life is Rubbish and that was obscured on Blur (1997) and 13 (1999) is back and their music is better for it.
This one hit hard and has been on my mind since reading it. I cried at the Rush lyrics.
Yeah, it's something that exists within those with the "artistic temperament". We can't just leave things well enough alone. It's definitely a temptation for me, and I'm still new at this game lol.