Popular Culture and Philosophy Pink Floyd and Philosophy Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! Edited by GEORGE A. REISCH OPEN COURT Chicago and La Salle, Illinois8 Roger Waters: Artist of the Absurd DEENA WEINSTEIN “Mister Glum,” the “gloomiest man In rock," a “ranting crank,” a “mere misogynist"—these are but a few of the epithets hurled at Roger Waters by rock critics. For more than three decades, the author of Pink Floyd's massive best-selling concept albums (one of them, Dark Side of the Moon, spent fourteen consecutive years on Billboard's top-200 album charts) has played rock's Rodney Dangerfield, getting no respect. Waters has consistently been described as holding “darkly cynical views of life and the human condition,” projecting a “grim misanthropy,” and writing “rock’s most neurotic lyrics.” The critics’ antipathy was sharpened by the contrast between Waters and his predecessor as leader and lyricist of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, Their styles could not have been more different, with Barrett specializing in trippy-dippy, whimsical, childlike dadaist songs. The fact that Barrett left as an acid casualty (or at least his descent into schizophrenia was interpreted in this Romantic mode) endeared him to the rock press and their read- ers who have always adored stars who sacrifice their mind or very life for their art.! This romantic reading of rock's casualties is largely responsible for misinterpreting Waters’s lyrics as direct teferences to Barrett. . Critics see Waters as a depressive pessimist mainly because his view of existence and his understanding of the function " Physically, such as Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. or ocmally. like Roky Erickson, Brian Wilson and Syd Barres Btpeend we” a cx tend towards lis Rock erties t ral pa to tel wen the MOS Critical } rock run counter (0 NET from even Iyricig ivism, eae the “Give peace a chance” aig, Cori is WY HY in Lennon). Waterss words were yoy imagine” Wytis y centainly Were NOL UNCersioe fy ih the} hopeful at al ahewey the slurs quoted above like thay foned baby swan calling an abandoned i ducking they Mor course, writers for the mass media have an extent: Wcenal philosophers t00, labeling them misundetthen hing could be Further from the truth, aii, (Oamused to Death : existence, and of what art should be, is ae eo eater of ech pilsopier Albert Conus Camus’ brand of existentialism became very popular with well. rtated youth of Wates’s war-baby generation on both sides Sf the Atlante? Waters was in high school when the British tritic and philosopher Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider in 1956. It was hugely popular and a good introduction to French exis- tentialists and their views of art. The same year, Camus, who had published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisypbus in 1942, released his well-received novel, The Fall, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature a year later. When he died in a car crash in France on January 4th, 1960, he was at the pinnacle of his career. Camus directly addressed art and artists in his two bes known works: The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1951). Waters also focuses on the artist in several of his best known efforts, the Pink Floyd albums, Wish You Were Here (1975) and The Wall (1977). For both, art is reality based. “Creation is the great mime,” Camus asserts in The Myth of Sisypbus. “Real literary creation uses reality and only reality with all its warmth and its blood, its passion and its outcries," he writes in The Rebel’ Camus was a central gure pant act efor members ofthe ealy SDS, athe HHP inthe US othe Toba act ntvenced the broader poll youth moverer "eRe nbs hd several Camus inspired pas a sagen Man Revel (New York: Vintage, 1956), p20? Hemet Namen Artist of the Attu mt Artis descriptive of life bat itis ne 1, Canmrs tells 19s, conc dent with il, Art, by de finition, req i requires some structure, some coherence, and that iy preasely whit 6 missing from life sell ‘This imposed structure is the artist's style or design, Like a painter who uses distinctive Colors oF specific subjects, Waterss me set of images such as the sun, the moon and derkness we the world’s impact on us; it does not purvey pleasing illusions that provide us with escape or refuge from life. Nor is it, as Nietzsche would have it, in The Birth of Tragedy, nature's “metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order to overcome it"—a tonic to give us vitality, to enable us to endure the world. The art Camus and Waters created does not soothe us, does not provide solace; instead it intensifies our dis- tress by evincing and heightening it. Why distress? Existence itself—and both authors see it this way—is absurd. Waters's grasp of the absurd, of our desire for unity and the frustration of that desire, forms the thematic of all his songs. It appears from his earliest creations including “Julia Dream” and “Corporal Clegg” (both released in 1968), *Green is the Colour” and “Cymbaline” (both released in 1969), through his several post-Floyd albums. Of his major works—the four 1970s concept albums—two address the absurdity of the human condition in general (Dark Side Of the Moon and Animals), and wo focus specifically on the absurd predicament of the artist, here the rock musician (Wish You Were Here and The Wall. in all his ere tions, Waters drew upon his own experiences to explore the variety of frustrated attempts at unity with others, the failed effort to connect. to communicate genuinely That Fat Old Sun. That desite to connect authentically, which is the basis of life itself for Waters and Camus, is frequently symbolized by them a8 the sun, Plato's metaphor for gooxtness itselt an The Republic Most of us take the role ot prisoners in his allegory of the cave ever ullowed only to see mere shadows of the world Mashed on the cave's walls, and thus having little chanee of understating