Popular Culture and Philosophy
Pink Floyd and
Philosophy
Careful with that Axiom, Eugene!
Edited by
GEORGE A. REISCH
OPEN COURT
Chicago and La Salle, Illinois8
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
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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