Q: Is This the Greatest Record Cover Ever?

A:

A Requiem for the Post-War Dream

I haven't listened to Pink Floyd in quite a long time, but they were, I think, my third favorite band. I don't mean they were ranked third--I mean sequentially. My first favorite was The Police, my second was The Beatles, then, when I was around age 16, Pink Floyd. (Then R.E.M., then Public Enemy, The Pixies, Prince, and then jazz blew the doors off and favorites got too numerous to track, though the good people at VISA could probably tell you stories about my Miles Davis collection.) I tend to obsess serially.

So but I should probably specify that I didn't like all of Pink Floyd's stuff. I was a Roger Waters man, meaning that I was down with Dark Side of the Moon through The Final Cut, since that was the sequence of albums that increasingly centered on his personal vision, many would say the band's detriment. Not me, though. I distinctly remember sitting in my bedroom, listening for hours through headphones to The Wall and The Final Cut (my two favorites) and thinking (and it was probably the first time I ever thought this about anybody), "Roger Waters is a genius!"

(And yet, to my shame, when Waters and the Waters-less Floyd toured through St. Louis at around the same time when I was in high school, who did I go to see? Yes, I admit it, I went for the glitz, friends.)

But when I got a little older and a (very) little hipper, Pink Floyd seemed hopelessly paleolithic. In college, I was pretty much only interested in alt-rock and hip-hop, and through the latter I was discovering other black music that was mostly new to me. Pink Floyd, I think it must be admitted, is one of our whiter bands, yes? I consigned them to the tarpits of dinosaur rock.

But recently, I've been broadening my horizons, getting into old stuff like Dylan, for the first time, for instance. And I found myself wondering, not so much about the entire Floyd oeuvre, but specifically about The Final Cut, and whether it would hold up now that I'm a bit less angsty than I was at 16. So this weekend, when I was at a (ahem) record convention, pawing through crates of vinyl, and I came across a copy of the record that looked pretty good, well, I had to get it.

Let me point out now that the original LP doesn't have any text on the cover, unlike the CD reissue pictured above, so the cover is even starker. Unfortunately, the vinyl I bought, while not scratched, is really dirty, and though I've been trying to clean it, it still sounds pretty bad. But not so bad that I haven't listened to it twice through already. And damned if it doesn't hold up after all.

This is a record that even most Pink Floyd fans dismiss as a failure. I thought I was the only fan, but I have found in the past couple of days a few hardy souls who have praised it on-line. A lot of them say they didn't like it at first, but it grew on them. It probably did for me, as well, but that was almost twenty years ago, so I can't remember for sure. It's definitely less immediately accessible than something like The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon, though, that's pretty clear. It's a rather dense record, with uniformly dark lyrics. But it's so clearly and strongly stamped with Roger Waters' personality, and so charged with emotion, that I still find it as compelling now as I remember from my teen years.

Dark, did I say? Does it get any dark-night-of-the-souler than these lyrics from the title track?

And if I show you my dark side
will you still hold me tonight?
And if I open my heart to you
and show you my weak side
what would you do?
Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?
Would you take the children away
and leave me alone?
And smile in reassurance
as you whisper down the phone?
Would you send me packing?
Or would you take me home?

Thought I ought to bare my naked feelings.
Thought I ought to tear the curtain down.
I held the blade in trembling hands,
prepared to make it, but--just then the phone rang.
I never had the nerve to make the final cut.

Wow. That blew my 16-year-old mind. And it still gets to me now (somehow the reference to Rolling Stone makes the whole thing seem very real to me, not just a fictional piece, but a confession).

And the music (which I have to agree with one of the writers I read on the internet about this record, but unfortunately I can't remember who it was), practically defines "dynamics" in music, going from almost whispered lyrics to huge screaming vocals, with sound effects and a few patented David Gilmour solos for good measure. This is operatic stuff.

The final track ("Two Suns in the Sunset")'s imagery of nuclear war, which seemed so powerful to me when the record was fairly new, when so many thought the bomb was the inevitable end of civilization (you don't hear so much about it these days, with smaller terrors more present in the public's mind), now seems a little overbaked. But the record is, in some ways, as politically timely today as it was when the British war in the Falklands inspired Waters' lyrics. Let us consign George Bush to the Fletcher Memorial Home "for colonial wasters of life and limb".

This was the last Pink Floyd record that Roger Waters had anything to do with. Gilmour, et al., put out A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which I found deadly dull, and Waters put out Radio KAOS, which was even denser and more solipsistic than his Floyd work. But even though a lot of people seem to think of The Final Cut as a Waters solo record--which is understandable--it seems clear to me that though it was very much his personal vision that shaped the record, it must have been tempered by the band itself, because it's so much better than what the various parties did after it--at least those two records I mentioned: I haven't followed anything any of them have done since, but I haven't heard or read anything to indicate that I've been missing out on anything too great.

Anyway, check it out, or re-investigate it if you didn't like it twenty years ago. It's a truly great record.