something about the Roger Waters album, "Is This the Life We Really Want"

Last month former Pink Floyd bass player and singer Roger Waters released Is This the Life We Really Want?, his fourth solo effort (not counting his three-act opera, Ça Ira). Unlike the previous three, the new album could almost be mistaken for a lost late Waters-era Pink Floyd album. It is fantastic. Passages and arrangements echo The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut. But this is not a nostalgia project. Waters' patented simple, impossibly catchy musical and lyrical refrains and singing to his own acoustic guitar-driven tunes provide a framework around which the album often employs traditionally Pink Floyd sounds. (Finding and using those sounds without sounding like a Floyd knockoff should be credited in large part to the accomplished, deft producer, Nigel Godrich.) This album is more Floydian than Pink Floyd's post-Waters-era A Momentary Lapse of Reason. And, yet, Is This the Life We Really Want? is undeniably a Rogers solo effort. His vocal retains its edge, but he is restrained and sounds less emotionally charged than he did singing with Pink Floyd. (Obviously, this can be attributed in part to his having aged.) The perspectives and opinions expressed in the lyrics are more political and more outwardly focused than his Pink Floyd lyrics.


Note: The bass guitar is brilliant on this album.

Billy Corgan on Billy Corgan and music today

Billy Corgan has caught a little hell for talking shit about Radiohead. But now, having read what he said in this interview, I think folks have misunderstood him. Here is the controversial part (parentheses mine):

From ’89 on I’ve had people tell me who I am. And they pick my personality as if it’s a one or two-dimensional thing, and I’m more like a tetrahedron. I can’t think of any people outside of Weird Al Yankovic who have both embraced and pissed on Rock more than I have. Obviously there’s a level of reverence, but there’s also a level of intelligence to even know what to piss on. ‘Cause I’m not pissing on Rainbow. I’m not pissing on Deep Purple. But I’ll piss on fuckin’ Radiohead, because of all this pomposity. This value system that says Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) is more valuable than Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple). Not in the world I grew up in, buddy. Not in the world I grew up in. 

So I find myself defending things. Is Ritchie Blackmore a better guitar player than me and Jonny Greenwood? Yes. Have we all made contributions? Yes. I’m not attacking that. I’m attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I’m sick of that.

I don't think Corgan is attacking Radiohead. He's using them as an example of a popular band that critics deify while trashing other artists, himself in particular. The "pomposity" is the pompousness of critics who fawn over select bands and citicize those whom its safe to criticize. Corgan's predictably irreverent response would be to "piss on fuckin’ Radiohead" because no one else will--not because Radiohead deserves to be pissed on.

In answering a different question, Corgan expands on this:

Look, we’re all insecure in our own ways, most of us. You’ve got a Facebook with a few hundred friends. If you do something truly radical, are you ready to withstand the forty negative comments? Most people aren’t. So they’re getting peer pressured at levels they don’t even realize. It’s what you don’t say. 

It’s like the government spying on us. Right? Now it becomes about what we don’t say. The same thing with culture. I’m just willing to say it, and deal with the forty negative comments.

To the extent that anything can be interesting, Corgan sort of can be because he's a bit of a paradox. He's trying to be a rock star but he thinks we have none, can have none, and that it's pointless and vain. As he did during the 90's early alt-rock scene, he's the champion of zeroes and outcasts because he is not accepted as cool (anymore); but he's also the antithesis of that guy because he makes a spectacle of himself by dating porn whores, shaving his head, saying inflammatory crap and whatnot. This paradox is him now.

He approaches all this later in this same interview:

And the funny thing is that I’ve been playing with conceptual identities all along. And I’ve watched each turn, as I’ve adapted to each cultural identity, how I’m attacked for not being this or that, or too much of this or too little of that. Meanwhile the real me is standing behind it all noting where the deflector shield works and where it doesn’t. And what gets through. Now I’m actually strong enough where I don’t need a mask. I’m just myself.

And then he brings this back to the original point--that he gets criticized unfairly (unfair because the playing field isn't even):

Well what I’m saying is rather than be celebrated as a radical who’s continually subverted the system and turned his back on much greater commercial realities than I’ve embraced, I’m celebrated as this fucking weirdo who just won’t go away!

Is he an ass? Oh yeah. And maybe he's wrong, too, but he might as well be understood before he gets shit on for being so.

Adult contemporary

Recently the New York Magazine article "Indie Grown-Ups: Are Wilco and Feist our adult contemporary music?" turned a critical eye on a few prominent indie rock artists, describing, for example, Feist's recent album as merely "gusty singsong melodies about finding clarity by the oceanside delivered over cozy acoustic arrangement". The author's larger point was this:

These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.

Later he indicts labels for having aided and abetted this trend, grooming innocuous sounds from the likes of Feist, Wilco, Radiohead, and Bon Iver to create a new generation's equivalent of adult contemporary.

Although written in response to a different New York Magazine article, The AV Club piece "What makes music boring?" reinterprets this critique by distilling and elaborating on the "cozy" quality described above, this time using the language of boredom:

In a sense, all music is boring. The same, however, can’t be said about “boring” music. “Boring” is its own genre. It is a code word that instantly conjures artists with clearly definable attributes. “Boring” music is slow to mid-tempo, mellow, melodic, pretty in a melancholy way, catchy, poppy, and rooted in traditional forms. It is popular (or popular-ish). It is tasteful, well-played, and meticulously produced. (Or it might sound like it was recorded in somebody’s bedroom under the influence of weed and Sega Genesis.) It is “easy to like”—or more specifically, “easy for white people to like” (“white people” being a sub-group of white people singled out by other white people). It is critically acclaimed (perhaps the most critically acclaimed music there is), and yet music critics relish taking “boring” musical artists down a peg more than any other kind of artist.

This critique to me seems easy to argue, which is to say I don't disagree. But it just isn't particularly insightful. Both articles essentially make this analogy:

• Adult Contemporary is to pop music genres as Feist is to indie music.

This analogy extends easily:

• Adult Contemporary is to pop music genres as Poison is to glam metal/hard rock.

It can even extend to other discussions:

• Adult Contemporary is to pop music genres as scones are to sweets.

And the articles aren't more controversial because they take on indie music--indie music has no exclusive claim to coolness. My comment on glam metal and scones means more. It took more imagination.