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Makes sense by kimvette · 2010-03-11 08:41 · Score: 1 · on EMI Cannot Unbundle Pink Floyd Songs

This makes sense for all of their albums past Meddle (well, including Meddle, really), since they were "concept albums" and are intended to be listened to straight through. There are very few Pink Floyd tracks that can be appreciated to the fullest as a single track.

Sadly, this is something that is lost on record labels today; they're in it for the quick buck rather than slowly nurturing future stadium-filling dinosaurs. Why invest in real artists who are composers, lyricists and musicians and will sell only to a cult following for the first 2-3 albums until they hit critical mass and make it really big, when you can just hire some young skank with big tits who can barely sing but is listenable when you run her voice through three levels of vocal processing, and you have songs already written by other writers and just need a pretty face to make a quick buck selling music and of course posters and other merchandise? Instead of making huge profits down the road they're in it for the now, with a steady stream of moderately-selling hits, and when the "pop artist" proves to be a train wreck and wigs out after a drug overdose or breakup or other drama queen crap, you already have songs and session musicians ready to be paired up with another young skank you can market.

I miss concept albums; most such artists recorded before my time (mostly my parents' generation) but progressive rock is my favorite genre. I can listen to practically very Pink Floyd album over and over and over again without getting sick of them. There are not many artists or even genres I can say that about, except possibly classical. In fact, most progressive rock is concerned about structure/form and quality that it could almost be considered a modern form of classical. It's not the overcompressed, over-processed vocals crap that has no semblance of dynamic range that passes for "pop" music today. Listen to Umagumma sometime; it was intended to be a purely experimental album (they did some really funky stuff including even partially disassembling pianos and modifying them) in its time (a double album with a live recording disc as a bonus) and the members of PF are embarassed about it today, but it's still really interesting to listen to with the volume turned up. The dynamic range is phenomenal and that alone makes it worth listening to, and Rick's tracks in particular are really enjoyable. Roger's tracks, well, they're just weird, especially "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" (I didn't even have to look up the title to check it- despite the length it's title not easily forgotten) but the weirdness doesn't detract from its interesting nature.

I'm glad they took this stand. I own every album of theirs (as well as every unauthorised bootleg I've found in music stores, such as "the eclipse" and a few other Italian-origin box sets) and have most of them ripped to my iPhone, and listen to them quite often - and most of the time I listen to them in the order originally intended. The songs are so interelated and transition very well going from one to the other that I think splitting them apart would be a shame, because people who are just discovering the genre now would miss out on fully enjoying the compositions.

I'd love to track down a lot of the ROIO bootlegs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleg_recording and http://www.pf-roio.de/roio/roio-cd-index-name.html ), especially Pre-animals concerts where they played "raving and drooling" (which I've never heard) and also various recordings of The Wall concerts, especially the part where Roger ad-libs prior to "Run like Hell."

Sadly, I do not own any Pink Floyd works on vinyl. :(

Re:Pink Floyd by Mattwolf7 · 2004-07-23 07:05 · Score: 1 · on U2 Threatens to Release Album Early on iTunes