Pink Floyd

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Pink Floyd

For many people, the group Pink Floyd is considered as un-popular, aged, and without any sense in today's modern society. It's so unfortunate that true rock and roll music is being left behind for the new head-splitting garbage that infests the airwaves today. The newest generation is unaware of the history behind all the "music" they listen to now. Where did it all begin? Who first wandered into the realms of psychedelic music to create a style and a culture that would last for decades, and never be copied? The answer of course is Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd was the first band in outer space. Since the mid-'60s, their music has relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same time they have wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words.

While Pink Floyd is mostly known for their extravagant concept albums of the 1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s, they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at first, Pink Floyd were a much more conventional act that the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British ban...

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...cosmic, about 20 years after Pink Floyd shed its original leader to resume its career with great commercial success, they would do the same again to his successor. Waters released ambitious solo albums to nothing more than moderate sales and attention, while he watched his former colleagues (with Wright back in tow) rescale the charts.

Pink Floyd still possesses a huge fan base, but there's little that's noteworthy about their post-Waters output. They know their formula, they can execute it on a grand scale, and they can count on millions of customers (many of them unborn when Dark Side of the Moon came out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was ever a member) to buy their records and see their sporadic tours, but they will never regain the musical genius they once had, both with Barrett and with Waters. One doesn't just listen to Pink Floyd, he or she experiences it.

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