OP:"I’ve heard every note Pink Floyd ever recorded (at least up until 1992)… "
snicker I read this just as if someone said “I hate All-You-Can-Eat buffets. I get so stuffed and bloated every time I go.”
When I don’t like a band, I usually toss them out after the first song (which explains why I have not heard every note Garth Brooks ever recorded).
You sound like an obsessed fan in denial, my friend 
My husband introduced me to Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull in my early 20s. (I’m 33, he’s 34.)
As a teenager, they both scared me because the only fans I knew were the druggies who wore their tour shirts in school…
I like both bands now.
Music, like humor is very subjective. What I think is great, you may consider awful. I feel that Pink Floyd is great. And now I’m old enough that part of the enjoyment is nostalgia. Jethro Tull is also good. For some reason I never hear Tull on any of the “oldies” stations. I wish I could find my “Too Old to Rock n Roll, Too Young to Die” album.
Ben
As always when it comes to music, art, books, dance, etc…
It always comes down to personal tastes.
You can either identify with it or not. You can either relate to it or not.
I happen to enjoy Pink Floyd, I have to be in a certain mood these days but I enjoy them and can’t explain it to you because you don’t enjoy Pink Floyd.
That’s the beauty of being human though. To what is beautiful to one person may be completely moronic (whatever that thing is.) It may be enjoyable to one and more like sitting in a room of screeching chalkboards to another.
(I can’t stand RAP, never could understand the appeal of it. I would rather have my head run over by a pick up than listen to that stuff, but I accept it as that I have different tastes.)
Not at all. A lot of my friends in college, whose opinions and tastes I shared in a lot of areas, were big fans. I listened to it all to give it a chance.
No, not every word was adolescent drivel. You can’t put out that much product without hitting something occasionally good, but the good nuggets were too few and far between.
As to age, I’m 32; so I hit the tail end of the age of the Pinkos.
As to what I listen to…, it varies a lot. The consistent favorites include Warren Zevon, Cowboy Junkies, Johnny Cash, The Clash, Paul Oakenfold, Waylon Jennings and Otmar Liebert.
I’ve never had a drug habit; so maybe that’s the hangup.
I get that it comes down to a matter of taste. What I don’t get is why so many people’s taste includes this band.
Eh. I love the band, even Syd Barrett’s early stuff (now THAT was “weird for the sake of weird”). The feeling I’ve always gotten from Pink Floyd was always one of mild melancholy… it’s never seemed very over-the-top or extreme to me (although compared to some of today’s music… ::shudder::… I could see how you can get that). After finishing listening to an album, I just always think, “Good goddamn…” Nothing angsty, nothing morbid… while there’s a hint of depression, each song (hell, each album) also has a whimsical nature and a bit of a wry smile tacked on.
And I ain’t never listened to Floyd whilst stoned, so it ain’t just drug music…
I was the 9-year old that owned The Wall on 8-track the year it came out. I loved it when it was a new album, found it much less thrilling when I was 15 and all my peers in high school suddenly “discovered” it, and absolutely cared for the album in toto not one whit after prolonged radio exposure of the singles over the past two decades.
<slight hijack>
Floyd I generally have no problems with…what I don’t like so much is hearing production effects that they used becoming cliches that now choke a lot of rock stuff I hear on the radio now.
The one I’m specifically thinking of here is the echoing voice effect that they used on “Us And Them” in 1973, then revisited on “Comfortably Numb” in 1979, then revisited again on “Worlds Apart” 15 years later (I’m sure there are more). The first two times it was creatively used; by the last, it was less creative, but at least I could tolerate it since they more or less invented that sound in the public consciousness…I could kinda put up with it since they owned it.
Doesn’t seem like a day goes by that my nerves aren’t being ground into powder by that sound, which turns up more often than you’d expect. When I heard it on the Foo Fighters “Learn To Fly,” it instantly killed the song for me because it was such a joke.
This does happen a lot, though, with any “pop” sound, from Phil Spector to “wacka-chicka-wacka” funk guitar to (most recently) that godawful pitch compensation that Cher used on “Believe.”
<end of hijack>
Think I’ll go pull out my copy of Meddle to remember what space music was really like…now that, my friends, was a great, great album…
Well, in specific response to the question the OP asks,
How can people stomach Pink Floyd?", obviously the answer is because we have better taste in music than you.
I own pretty much everything Pink Floyd has done (inexplicably I never bought Atom Heart Mother and I avoided Pulse and Delicate Sounds of Thunder) and I can say that I unequivocally like all of it.
I think that for me it was that they seemed to be interested in the craft of making and innovating music, not being jagger-esque rock star icons. I liked both Gilmour’s artistry and Waters’ cynical lyrics and I think the tension between them really made the band’s music even more powerful, until it tore the band apart, of course.
Anyway, I suppose this thread is really a big YMMV thing, but since they’re one of my favorite bands, I had to jump in.
Oh, and by the way, I love em and I’ve never taken an illegal drug in my life.
As a fan of Pink Floyd, I can certainly explain why I like them, and I can offer some good reasons that they became popular, but I CAN’T explain why they became mega-popular… and it may interest the OP to know that Roger Waters never understood it (or liked it) either.
Prior to “Dark Side of the Moon,” Floyd was really a cult band. They had a small, loyal following, that appreciated their oddness. But “Dark Side of the Moon” sold about 20 million copies (and counting) and made them huge stars. That was both good and bad, of course. I’m sure they enjoyed the money they made, but on the down side, they now had millions of fans who liked them but didn’t really “get” them.
(Why did it happen to them? Why not to King Crimson or Gentle Giant? Nobody knows. Nobody EVER knows why one record sells like crazy, while equally good records by the same band stiffed. )
It annoyed Roger Waters no end that songs he’d written about existential despair were now widely viewed as background music for stoners. Indeed, “The Wall” was largely an angry reaction to Pink Floyd’s newfound success and celebrity. Waters hated being surrounded by 20,000 screaming dopers who didn’t really understand or appreciate anything he was trying to say in his songs.
He must have been miserable olaying hockey arenas, thinking:
“I’m trying to sing about the death of my father, while idiots are whooping and waving Bic lighters.”
“I’m trying to sing about finding some meaning in my life, and girls are taking that as a cue to flash their boobs at me.”
Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull are my two favorite bands.
What kind of stupid question is the OP? I could as easily say to you “how can you stomach Johnny Cash?” but it would be a stupid question. Obviously, you enjoy the way it sounds. Big ole duh on that one.
I became a PF and JT fan long before I’d even had so much as a sip of alcohol, so it wasn’t drugs that made me like them.
As for the comment about about JT being formulaic, I can only laugh.
God damnit, I wrote a really good post and the freakin’ board ate it. Anyhoo, the gist of it was that I can take or leave PF, by and large, but I certainly don’t hate them. I’m not a fan of prog rock in general; you will never catch me listening to ELP, Tull, Rush, Yes, or pretty much any other prog band with the exception of the Alan Parsons project.
PF is about the least offensive, though. I only own one of their albums – Piper at the Gates of Dawn – and only because I do like mid-60s psychedelia. Of their other albums, ironically Dark Side of the Moon is probably my least favorite, thanks to overexposure. Wish You Were Here, Meddle and The Wall are probably the albums I like the best.
David Gilmour, though, is one of the top four or five rock guitar players ever. (I don’t think his solos in “Time” are very “Eagles-like,” as another poster said, but I don’t think that’s much of an insult anyway. Love or hate the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, Don Felder and Joe Walsh were all exceptional guitar players.) Gilmour’s best solos have something in common with the other great rock guitarists like Clapton and Beck–you can hum them. They’re as recognizable and easy to remember as the melodies to the songs they’re in.
First of all, i have never taken an illegal drug, and i think this is because i found pink floyd early on. its a nice substitute.
and secondly, to keep my hijack short, i cant stand ‘fans’ who like the music, but dont get where theyre coming from. Cult fans are the only pink floyd fans for me.
Why must someone have a drug habit to be a Pink Floyd fan? I’m 16, have never done any drugs or been drunk, and I have had several opportunities to be both. I was never part of “the Pink Floyd Generation,” and I have liked them as one of my favorite bands all my life.
Think of the guitar breaks in “Time”. Now mentally remove Gilmour’s track and try to imagine a guitar solo that works better. I certainly can’t.
Gilmour was a master at crafting a guitar solo to fit the space available. Put him in front of a band playing Generic Blues Riff #36, and there are a few hundred who could outplay him, but only a handful of people could have recorded those parts in “Comfortably Numb”.
Dr. J
Now you’ve done it. You’ve knocked two of my favorite bands, but I’ll be reasonable about this incident. I realize I have somewhat pretentious taste in music. (Anybody who gives Tales From Topographic Oceans more than one star is pretentious; I give it three of four.) First, a few demographics: I’m 21 years old, and was hooked on both bands by my father. I’ve never used illegal drugs, so I’m not one of the people who listen to Pink Floyd when high.
I agree that segments of Pink Floyd can be dull to listen to. I only like about half of what’s on The Wall; Animals has a few stinkers IMO, but there’s also a lot of good music there. I especially like the era when they were making the transition from psychedelic rock to progressive rock. Meddle and More both hold up well all the way through. Wish You Were Here is another solid album. The title track is a beautiful and simple number.
That being said, Waters is quite full of himself. It does get tiring to hear that the point of WWII was to kill his father. The Final Cut is another self absorbed downer. I understand why people might not be able to stomach it, but it’s my favorite. My biggest gripe is that the angst and emotion sometimes seem manufactured by Waters as a call for attention, not as a publicity stunt but because the guy was emotionally fragile.
I like Pink Floyd because I sometimes like to get wrapped up in the flow of an album. I like a lot of the themes. I like a lot of the melodies and solos. I like the atmosphere.
Moving on, it’s the Jethro Tull dig that really fired me up. How can you possible call them predictable? Their albums range from blues albums (This Was (1968), Catfish Rising (1990)), to progressive rock concept albums (Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play), to classic rock (Too Old to Rock and Roll: Too Young to Die), to folk metal (Heavy Horses, Songs From the Wood), finally to synthesized pop (Under Wraps, A). Sure, Bungle in the Jungle and Teacher are trite, but they’re hardly representative of Tull’s catalog in it’s entirety.
Ian Anderson (songwriter, second guitarist, and flautist) can write incredibly pretentious lyrics, but he’s not above self mockery either. The album most commonly derided as a pretentious is A Passion Play, but in some ways the album is an intentional self mockery of that pretension involving the response to the bands last album, Thick as a Brick.
They also have a lot of more simple themes. While I wouldn’t say they have a lot of love songs, they do have a number of lust songs. Their latest studio album, Dot-Com, has a couple of simple but beautiful songs like Wicked Windows (about Ian looking back on his life), and A Gift of Roses (another look back, but more about coming home too). Even in their progressive (pretentious) heyday, they had songs like Mother Goose (about the strange things to be seen about town).
I love Jethro Tull because they run such a wide musical range. They have songs I can sit and ponder for hours on end. They have one offs I can play along with. They have beautiful melodies. They have interesting musical arrangements.
Anyway, that’s how I stomach Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. Thanks for asking.
The hardest thing to stomach about Pink Floyd is the fact that when they released ‘Pulse’ (a live album) they never had to studio touch-up or re-record a single note on any of the songs.
They played everything note perfect on every occasion in every live concert the album drew from.
Bastards. How dare they be so talented!?!.
depends on how you define exceptional. technically proficient - yes. but music is more than technical proficiency, for instance, to my ears, kurt cobain’s solo in smells like teen spirit is far superior to anything done by those guitarists. he sure didn’t have the technical prowess that they did, and the slts solo may be really simple (it is after all, just the song’s melody played on guitar), but to me, it says so much more and does so much more than the eagles ever did.
of course, it’s all opinion.
wasn’t that some kind of hovercraft?
Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull are two of the only bands that I can listen to as the only thing I’m doing. Most music is something to listen to while working on something, or while exercising, or while doing something else. PF and JT are for putting on, then just sitting back, eyes closed, and listening.
I’ve seen them both in concert and they were both great.