Pink Floyd

[Engy]

Are my music tastes out of date if I still consider Comfortably Numb and Another Brick in the Wall to be better than any music created recently?

[Mikalyaran]

I would consider you enlightened not out of date. I might be biased though since I agree with you :p only a small amount of modern music can begin to measure upto floyd imo. the late 60's and early 70's was a great era for music.

[JohnnyEgregious]

If all you like is 60's and 70's rock, then your music tastes ARE out of date. If it's just a Pink Floyd thing then that only means your taste is narrow. But are those two your actual, favorite Floyd songs or just examples? If you had a top 5 Floyd songs, what would they be? I'd go for...

1. Brain Damage/Eclipse it's kind of a two part song, but I'd be happy with just Brain Damage.
2. Wish You Were Here
3. Chapter 24
4. Bike
5. When The Tigers Broke Free ("And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while" has to be one of m favorite lyrics ever)

[Engy]

I'm not saying all I like are 60s and 70s rock, all I'm saying is that I find those two songs(along with the majority of Pink Floyd) to be of a higher quality than the vast majority of today's music.

[Vince_LomPARTAY]

It's pretty obvious that Pink Floyd isn't relevent music anymore and the only reason young people care about them is nostalgiah, because when they first discovered music they went looking through their parent's cd collection and found Pink Floyd.

[Mikalyaran]

It's pretty obvious that Pink Floyd isn't relevent music anymore and the only reason young people care about them is nostalgiah, because when they first discovered music they went looking through their parent's cd collection and found Pink Floyd.

How is pink floyd no longer relevant? Some of the themes there music delves into are relevant to the human condition and thereby timeless. shiny on you crazy diamond is about losing a friend. That happens to a lot of people and so is quite relevant. The Wall's main character hides who he really is which is something a lot of people do. I'll admit i can't give you any kind of discussion on atom heart mother or clouds or a number of their albums. I was born in 80 and didn't discover floyd until i was in my mid twenties. I had heard of them of course but I didn't know their music. Nothing to do with my parents at all.

[JohnnyEgregious]

It's pretty obvious that Pink Floyd isn't relevent music anymore and the only reason young people care about them is nostalgiah, because when they first discovered music they went looking through their parent's cd collection and found Pink Floyd.

Also p'shaw. The only Pink floyd song my dad likes/knows is Wish You Were Here. He's all about country and my mom's all about reggae. I find
"Welcome to the Machine" more and more relevant every day, "When the Tigers Broke Free" is one of the most powerful songs about war I've ever heard, and besides, when did drugs lose relevance with today's kids?

[balder]

My top 5 Floyd songs would be:

5. Have a Cigar
4. Learning to Fly
3. Comfortably Numb
2. Brain Damage/Eclipse
1. On the Turning Away

[mudze]

imo music, regardless of what kind, never ever gets out of date.
and about relevant music...pff how is music supposed to be relevant anyway? it may inspire people to who knows what, but relevance in other terms?

my top5 btw
5 one of my turns
4 high hopes
3 comfortably numb
2 wish you were here
1 echoes

[SteveMB]

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's better than "any music created recently" -- but it is better than most.

Obviously, our view of the past is tinged by a nostalgia filter: 90% of everything is crap now and 90% of everything was crap then, but we only make comparisons against the former because the latter is long forgotten.

[mudze]

discovering new music for oneself always involves a bit of work, i guess. so if one doesn´t invest some time in exploring new bands all he gets to know of the new stuff out there is what is played on tv or radio...and that is often quite bad

and then,of course, you don´t find anything equal to good bands from the 70s like pink floyd

[Arkenputtyknife]

Hmm… favorite Floyd tracks:

1. Echoes
2. Paintbox
3. Careful with that axe, Eugene
4. Several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a Pict
5. Arnold Layne

That probably says a lot about me…

As for 'relevence', the earlier posters have it right: for the most part, music doesn't lose relevance, it merely becomes unfashionable for a while. Which says far more about the foolishness of being a slave to fashion, than about the music itself.

[BLANDCorporatio]

SteveMB nailed it: 90% of everything is crap, but the crap (usually) gets forgotten in time.

I like Pink Floyd a lot too (except Roger Twaters), and Brain Damage/Eclipse is one of the top two best album endings ever. Of course, musical tastes being what they are I believe it is equaled and maybe even *gasp* surpassed by Ascension from Anathema's Eternity ...

The problem with Pink Floyd is that they seem to attract a huge amount of snobbery. It's not their fault, it's the fans. See, every once in a while somebody does a Pink Floyd cover. Btw, this shows how relevant and influential PF are. Anyway, inevitably some troglodites will swarm youtube and declare that any PF cover is, basically, boop and a blasphemy and affront to the original. Covers are not supposed to sound EXACTLY like the original, people!

Then, a different snobbery. PF had different phases. There was the Gilmour-led, most recent. The Twaters-led, before that until The Final Cut. And yet before that there was, as some poster above is surely familiar, the Barrett-led.

No self-respecting musicologist will ever admit, even under torture, to liking anything from the Gilmour era.

In fact, the true hardcore music snob will never admit, even under torture, to like anything outside of the Barrett era- and even then with caveats.

So yeah ... Pink Floyd, helping to define the spectrum of snobbery since about 1965.

Finally, if there needs to be a top 5 then it would go like this (notice the Twaters songs; hey the guy has talent, just like Peter Sellers --> was a dick):

5 Atom Heart Mother
4 Wish you were here
3 Comfortably numb
1 Brain Damage/Eclipse (yes, double 1)
1 High Hopes (yes, double 1)

[Arkenputtyknife]

Then, a different snobbery. PF had different phases. There was the Gilmour-led, most recent. The Twaters-led, before that until The Final Cut. And yet before that there was, as some poster above is surely familiar, the Barrett-led.

I think that's to some degree inevitable with any long-lived band, and it's not always snobbery. Everyone has different tastes, and there's always something fairly specific that attracts a particular listener to a particular band. But few bands can survive doing the same thing forever, and line-ups change, so the music evolves—consequently losing the characteristics that attracted the listener in the first place.

For me, the extreme example of this isn't Floyd, but Tangerine Dream. I adore their mid-70's works, but I'd rather be buried in quicklime than listen to anything they made after 1980. Is that snobbery? I don't think so. The band moved on and so did I; we just went in different directions. They still have plenty of followers, and I wish them well with their ongoing success (Edgar Froese is 65 now, for heaven's sake), but all of the more recent stuff that I've heard has left me cold.

Getting back to Floyd, for me they're a bit of an anomaly. Like many of my age group, I was introduced to them when Dark Side of the Moon came out. That album socked everyone between the eyes; around '73-5, you couldn't go anywhere without hearing Money in the background. It wasn't until 15 or more years later that I started to realize that I liked the earlier songs—Barrett and co—more than the later blockbusters.

(It didn't hurt that unlike most rock albums at the time, DSotM was sufficiently well-produced and well-manufactured that it was a tough test for the so-called hi-fi systems of the day. When I bought my first quality sound system, I played DSotM to my roommate. His jaw dropped; he'd never heard it played on a decent system, and had no idea that it began with the sound of heartbeats. The average cheapo ‘hi-fi’ system back then just couldn't reproduce them. Never mind the horrors of reproducing the intro to Time without burning your ears off.)

So while it's usually the first exposure to a band that determines the era of interest, it's not always the case. I'm not sure where the line between taste and snobbery lies, but there clearly is one.

But sometimes, the music is just plain bad. I continue to think that The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is mostly horrible.

[Alcazabedabra]

Oh, man. I still listen to Wish You Were Here. Hell, I know all the lyrics. I sing it sometimes. Fun to play the riff on the guitar.

Hope they put that song on Rock Band. Is it on Rock Band?

[woodstock_pv]

First of all: I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan, I have all the albums and even some solo albums from David Gilmour and Syd Barret. They have a lot of great songs, and some of them unknow to some, like the music "when you're in" from Obscured by clouds and "Up the Khyber" from More. I'm not very fond of another brick in the wall part 2 which is what people usually refer when saying just "another brick in the wall", it´s a three part song after all..
Anyway.. I'm writing this becouse I had similar thoughts with most of people in this topic: music nowadays aren´t as good as most classics we love like Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, The Doors, etc.. but.. I changed my mind.. just becouse MTV sells a lot of shitty music does not mean there aren't good artists out there in the world.. they usually aren't mainstream, at least not here in Brazil.. so I'll make a list here of some of the best things I collected on internet in the past years and hope that someone will see and comment, for the bad or for the good. The main thing is.. music changed, so do not expect to see anything like the classics I mentioned above.. oh.. and I like Jazz a lot. To extend my rant a little, Jazz can be considered father to Rock'n Roll, it's a genre with little classification and the best thing we can say about it is that improvisation is it's key.

First some oldies I think more people should listen to:

Yessongs - Yes (the best progressive rock album ever made IMHO)
Tommy - The Who (see the movie also)
Bursting out - Jethro Tull (astonishing)
2112 - Rush (Hyper power drumming and a masterpiece to the group)
Soul Derby - Billy Preston (To some the fifth beatle, excellent keyboeard player)
Afro Harping - Dorothy Ashby (very cool)
Ethiopiques - Mulatu Astatke (He helped the afrobeat style grow in popularity and it's an icon of the genre)
Fela Kuti (Any album! Seriously.. if you even don't like the lyrics the chances are you're going to be stunned by the instrumentals, listen sorrow tears and blood)
Vince Guaraldi (the creator of the soundtrack of Peanuts, especially the albums "vince guaraldi and the lost cues" 1 and 2)
George Winston (also a pianist, see his versions of the Peanuts soundtrack)

For some new sounds:

Dap Dippin With - Sharon Jones and the Dap kings (a mix between the old and the new)
Walking Backwards - Clucthy Hopkins (Nobody knows who this guy is, some say he's a crazy old lunatic with a huge beard in some american desert, but he is good)
Liberation afrobeat - Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra (even if you dislike afrobeat you just have to listen to this)
Fight - Kokolo afrobeat orchestra (more afrobeat, they're great)
Fashion Nugget - Cake (tough they aren't really that new this album still is great)

Last, but not least it's my greatest recomendations, some brazilian sound that isn't Bossa Nova or Samba.. I really hope someone listen to what I'll post here, great sounds that even most people here don't know.

Transa - Caetano Veloso (If you know him forget all about you ever heard, most songs are in english since at the time he was exiled from Brazil and was in UK)
Tecnicolor - Mutantes (wait, download everything Mutantes has on the net, they're the best rock-tropicalia-little-jazzy sound I know)
Jacaranda - Bonfá and Eumir Deodato (Jazz masterpiece)
A bad Donato - João Donato (Jazz worldwide masterpiece, in the recordings of the album legend says he was on the effect of LSD 100% of the time)

With this post I hope to help people know more musics and more culture, feel free to make critics or praises and, of course, recommend me some good stuff too.
Sorry about any english mistakes I may have made, I know some people are sensitive about their home language.

[MarbitChow]

Pink Floyd should be auto-tuned so that he sounds more like T-Pain.

[Trine]

Check out this awesome live version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XWHLP1ZI

My favorite band is Rush, but Pink Floyd is right up there for me. The plus side is that Rush is still putting out (amazing) albums. One coming out this year before the summer tour. Can't wait!