Many progressive musicians have often turned their noses up at popular music. The likes of Genesis and Yes were making music for those with a more refined taste than the average listener, and nothing was worse than someone cashing out and making the kind of simplistic songs that wouldn’t be out of place next to the Carpenters on the radio. But there’s a certain magic behind writing a great pop song, and Roger Waters knew the difference between what was soulless and what had some genuine feeling behind it.
Despite Pink Floyd being one of the poster children for what progressive rock was supposed to sound like, each of them grew up on the kind of pop music that rock and roll grew out of in the 1960s. Each of them was an avid Beatles fan, but when looking at records like John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Waters saw something different than the traditional pop ditties the Fab Four got up to.
He knew that someone could sprinkle in some genuine emotion into the mix if they wanted to, and even when Floyd made their masterpieces with Waters, he never forgot about that empathy. ‘Echoes’ was the breeding ground for that kind of song, but up until working on The Wall, Waters wanted to make tunes that spoke to people on a far more visceral level than a silly pop song.
But right as Waters embarked on his solo career, things had started to look a little different for the pop market. They had been through the MTV decade that thrust neon colours into the limelight, but if everyone talked about Michael Jackson with reverence in 1982, they were hyping up people like Garth Brooks in 1992. The country boom had officially started, and Waters wanted absolutely no part of it.
He had grown up listening to folksy music like The Band, but as far as Waters could tell, Brooks represented everything cheap about pop music when looking at modern music shows, saying, “I watched that channel when I was in Madrid a couple of days ago. I thought it was horrible. There was this prat, all mouth and trousers, delivering nasty, cheap, puerile banter about the video countdown. I recently found out how Billboard magazine compiles their charts. They’ve shifted the emphasis away to supermarkets. That’s why Garth Brooks is Number One.”
That’s not to say that the country industry was absolutely terrible during that time, either. The charts were never going to be putting something like Amused to Death at the top of the charts during those days, but since Brooks could write fantastic ballads, it was easier for the casual music fan to pick up one of his records than have to worry about whatever massive record a prog rock band was making at the time.
But going up against the country music machine was a bigger task than most people thought. The industry has its own insulated way of working with the charts, and when acts like Tim McGraw and Shania Twain started selling like gangbusters in the 1990s, it was easy for everyone to move from the despair of grunge to the line dance craze that was sweeping the US.
While there will always be a place for Roger Waters in the hearts of music fans, seeing someone like Garth Brooks reach the top of the charts was really his wake-up call for how modern music worked. It had started out as an artistic venture, but people were now more interested in looking at records the same way they looked at groceries.
