Pink Floyd Albums Ranked from Most Pretentious to Most Pretentious

Dear Friends,

It's hootenanny time! Wait, why are you grabbing a shotgun and murdering Fran Drescher? Oh, I see... you misheard me. I said hootenanny time, not... well never mind, now you've done it. 

Anyway, the Hard Taco song for November is called, "Best Cuppa Coffee," and it's a perfect little grit-sized morsel of a hoedown. It gets in, spills some hillbilly juice on the carpet for two minutes, and gets out. But be careful. It's still long enough to leave your thigh sore from all the knee-slapping!

Lie Back and Think of England Some More

A few digests ago, I wrote about the ways that Jethro Tull, in all their flamingo-like glory, influenced my growth as a songsmith (or, if you will, a songwright.) This time, I want to revel in the self-righteous aura of another overwrought classic rock band that so many of us obsessed about in high school... Pink Floyd. 

Pink Floyd went through several phases. Their first album featured the songwriting (or if you will, songcraft) of Syd Barrett, whose lyrics tended to dwell on weighty political themes.

Floyd than put out a series of albums that featured atmospheric, ethereal, spacey, long-form quasi-improvisational psychedelic ghost jams, such as this one. 

But they really hit their stride when they turned over songmaking (or, if you will, songforging) to Roger Waters, whose efforts to capture the aural landscape of angst have enthralled so many generations of melancholy teenagers. But little-known fact: The Dark Side of the Moon was originally written as a country/western album and intended to be sung with a thick Southern drawl. Just look at the lyrics: 

    "Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown."

    "Leave but don't leave me."

    "Think I'll buy me a football team. Yee haw!"

Pink Floyd were the masters of the sequel. "Another Brick in the Wall" was a modest success, but the follow up, "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" was a monster hit! The formula for a successful sequel, of course, was to take everything that people liked about the first song and make it bigger and better. More explosions, gorier deaths. The kill counts were always higher in the sequel songs like Pigs on the Wing Part 2, a New Machine Part 2, and The Grand Vizier's Garden Party Part 2.  

The notorious rivalry between front men Roger Waters and David Gilmour reached a head during the recording of the album Animals. When Waters showed up to the studio with an 11-minute song called "Pigs," Gilmour was furious. He stormed back to his hotel room and came back the next morning with a 16-minute song called "Dogs."  This turned into an arms race of impossibly tedious compositions about similar-sounding creatures:

Gilmour and Waters had very different approaches to singing. Gilmour's vocal style could be described as utilizing the air flow between the diaphragm and mouth to vibrate the vocal folds, manipulating the larynx to create recognizable pitches. In other words, singing. 

Waters, on the other hand, felt that the voice should be a conduit for self-pity and despair, rather than musical notes. He once spent an entire studio session repeating the phrase, "No one kills the children anymore," into a microphone while producers applied high voltage shocks to his groin at unpredictable intervals. The result was the 1983 album, The Final Cut. 

With warmest regards,

Zach