No one should go into the studio looking to create music strictly to entertain. As much as many people lose the plot when it comes to their record, it’s important for them to at least strive to make something that means more to people than the odd catchy song that they hear on the radio. And since Roger Waters has been looking at the bigger picture when it comes to music for years, he found it much easier when looking at the people who weren’t paying as much attention as they should have.
Because the minute he left Pink Floyd, Waters never sought to stop being creative. He only knew that he had taken the band as far as they could go together, and if he wanted to express himself fully, that meant trying out new directions that didn’t necessarily have the same lineup, like working with Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton on his later records or writing an entire classic piece on Ca Ira.
But as soon as he left the fold with Pink Floyd, music had already begun going through a radical change. The Wall had come out in conjunction with the MTV generation, but whereas most people saw the idea of music videos as a clever way to give a visual medium to an auditory genre, it only took a few years for Waters to start seeing some of the cracks in the foundation when he turned on the channel.
He was always interested in watching his music be broadcast to people, but there was a reason why people were straying away from legacy acts and starting to focus on more photogenic stars. David Bowie managed to toe the line pretty well in his MTV era, but once the next decade got started, everything that Waters hated about music could be broken down to what The Spice Girls were doing.
Sure, they had the kind of reception that few other acts in the 1990s could match, but all that Waters saw were a bunch of people posturing to use up every bit of their 15 minutes of fame, saying, “The fact that I know there was one called Scary and one called Posh and so on means they must have penetrated my consciousness. But they were absolutely the lowest common denominator of musical, and all other, tastes.”
At the same time, it’s much easier to take Waters’s perspective and make it out to be someone who doesn’t see the value in new music. Say what you want to about every member of the group back in their prime, but the music still holds up in certain places. Even though ‘Wannabe’ is one of the biggest earworms of the 1990s, the production is still immaculate, and the hook has burrowed into people’s skulls for generations, for better or worse.
But Waters is probably seeing that the real problem here is the difference in approaches. He always wanted to use his music to communicate his feelings, and while the Spice Girls were concerned with the surface level, that didn’t mean that there weren’t some moments when they could tug on some fans’ heartstrings.
If anything, this is the same problem that The Beatles had among themselves. Waters may have catered to John Lennon’s mantra of waking people up and having them face reality, but there’s nothing wrong with going the route that Paul McCartney took and making music solely to make some of his biggest fans happy.
