PINK FLOYD

well at least it was done by excellent people to great results!

I got salty about that list from a couple weeks ago and decided to write up my own ranking of Pink Floyd's songs. It's 19,000 words. I have no idea what to do with it.

https://pinkfloydsongsranked.blogspot.com/

this is pretty fuckin fab, dude
"bitten by a radioactive mellotron" lolol

...or should i say it RULES

the 'their mortal remains' exhibit at the V&A ruled

you put a lot of frickin time into this rushomancy
I don't think I could put comfortably numb at #1 with how overplayed it is

I'm glad you placed burning bridges somewhat high (high meaning closer to #1)

this is great

/re-listening to matlida mother. don't remember it

/never heard Crumbling Land before and this makes me happy. has the same burning bridges sunny soft spoken vibe

Nobody, not even the Butthole Surfers, has better brought out the latent psychedelic potential of barking dogs.

great read rushomancy, sending me back to revisit a few neglected tunes

awesome!

thanks folks! yeah, i'm a big-ass floyd fan going back about 25 years; i've spent countless hours listening to their stuff. it was an interesting challenge to write critically about them because i honestly do love pretty much all their stuff through 1983, including the stuff i trashed in my write-up. (seriously i listen to "more" SO FUCKING MUCH.) so except for writing about "the wall", which has twenty-six fucking songs on it and took me forever to get through, it was a labor of love. i'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and if i'd ever developed any professional skills i'd probably be seeing how i could get it published out there so more people could read it. i went into data analysis instead so it'll probably wind up just being you and my facebook friends. :)

yeah I like that list. can't argue too much with most of it though I like some of those songs you hated a lot more than you do. would have been interesting to have done momentary and division bell also though

i really enjoyed reading through it, well done!

would have been interesting to have done momentary and division bell also though

only insofar as their relation to 'final cut' tracks, really. it's a good line

great list rushomancy, where does Fearless place? (there was no #)

OF COURSE I had DSOTM playing on the car stereo while I was breaking down camp in a Nebraska cow pasture on the morning of the eclipse. It felt mandatory like taking acid for a 2001 A Space Odyssey screening.

I also found a copy of the Zee album in a Missoula record store. Legitimately stoked!

And while I recommended it above, one of the disappointing things about the Their Mortal Remains installation was the outsized importance given to Momentary/Delicate Sound/Division Bell/Pulse. I think there were two full rooms for these, while the final cut got, like, one small video screen squeezed at the end of the Wall installation (which itself was smaller than what was given over to Momentary). And zero reference to Endless River, though I can't really complain about the end of the exhibit, which is one room dedicated to running the Live 8 performance on a loop on four screens.

great blog rushomancy!

going through the whole floyd discography for the first time since the ilx poll

pink floyd rules

I listened to The Division Bell & "High Hopes" rules

really enjoyed your list rushomancy even as i disagreed with it constantly (i love "flaming"!!!! "it would be so nice" isn't *that* bad!!!!!)

meant to say: I listened to the Division Bell this weekend, yeesh

also I made a Floyd mix for myself this weekend & put multiple tracks from Momentary Lapse of Reason & Delicate Sound of Thunder. washing it down with an imaginary Michelob

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYsSr88UEAARDLD.jpg

beer RULES

Really enjoyed reading that rushomancy, despite the fact I'm a sucker for *every* single bit of Wright's upper middle class malaise filled songwriting.

awesome list, rushoman. my ultimate floyd song isn't "comfortably numb" (it's "brain damage / eclipse"!) but besides that i agree way more with this than that pithy thing wyman put together

I enjoyed reading it, and did indeed read it from beginning to end even though parts of it had me thinking "yeah, that's bollocks"

It takes until the fourth track on "A Saucerful of Secrets" for us to encounter the Roger Waters we all know and love - the one who wrote terrible, terrible songs.

truth bomb

Balls, "Corporal Clegg" is great.

I can't argue with that top 10 rushomancy, it rules and I love you have pillow of winds and fearless so high up in there. Meddle is the best.

one thing I'd disagree with on that list (well there are a few but this one is mystifying to me) is why When the Tigers Broke Free is ranked so high. Do you really think it's that good? maybe because that song was basically unavailable to me until the past several years so I have little attachment to it, it just has always seemed like a trifle.

I'd normally be the last person on the planet that would defend The Wall, but...

107. Goodbye Cruel World - Waters closes side two of his two-album rock opera by having his protagonist kill himself.

...wut?

i never read that as Pink killing himself, more that he completely removes himself from the world and reality.

Yeah, that's pretty much the correct reading - the "wall" is completed at the end of side 2, and is torn down at the end of side 4 - everything in between takes place "behind the wall" ...

that was a great read rushomancy

PINK FLOYD RULES

the only ranking i took issue with was goodbye blue sky at a mere #59. i think i might be the only one who rates it here (this is the first mention of it in the thread) but i love that song. your description of it ("A strange, strange song. The vocal line is particularly odd here. Gorgeous vocal harmonies doubled by dissonant synth, until the chorus, where it's doubled by consonant piano. Almost sounds like a sketch or a demo given the benefit of immaculate production. I can't really tell if it was meant to be so fleeting.") is apt, and all of those things make it one of my faves! but maybe i'm also conflating the song with the animated sequence from the movie. the part with the real bird that transforms into the animated mecha-giant bird, swooping down and clawing up a part of a city and flying off, leaving this dripping bloody patch behind, always sticks with me.

If anyone is dumb like me and is tempted to the end to see what rushomancy thinks about the best Pink Floyd songs, STOP. Reverse course. Start at the beginning. These are golden eviscerations.

otm

the bottom's where all the good chewy goodness is

Indeed. Much admiration for how the tone gradually changes from condemnation to high praise. Also thrilled how I didn't have to click to read each song review!

Also thrilled how I didn't have to click to read each song review!

god, this. one almost forgets how deeply sunk we are into the monetized internet until you run across something like this that just wants to be read as easily as possible

(i think that's why i end up spending most of my time on ILX too)

yeah co-sign -- bless u rushomancy

Not having to click to read the next message is exactly how ILM got so popular.

(lol - i meant the non-monetized part, although an ILX where the next message instantly appeared without refreshing would be fun)

Very glad y'all are enjoying it, loving reading everyone's feedback about it.

Re: Fearless: There were a couple pairs of tracks where I didn't feel I could separate them and I just numbered both of them jointly, so "Pillow of Winds" and "Fearless" are numbers 7 and 8, in whichever order you please.

Glad to hear people are liking the simple, text-only format. It's the only way I know how to write on the Internet; I grew up on Usenet and I still use underscores to indicate italics. I sort of feel like it's a disadvantage, and that younger people are going to look at a plain, unadorned wall of text, roll their eyes, and say "tl;dr". I don't understand how requiring people to click more makes content more likely to be read, myself, but I'm probably old and out of touch.

I do regret leaving off MLOR and TDB. It gives the false impression that I'm with the camp that don't think of them as "real Pink Floyd albums", whatever the fuck that means. Because of the circumstances I grew up in, I just never grew to love them the way I did the rest of their stuff. I think they're great records with a lot of stuff to like about them, and I feel my writing about it would wind up being more negative than positive. I also feel like Dave Gilmour is a decent guy who means well, and I'd take no pleasure in picking apart the flaws of the last two records.

Inspiring disagreement is most of the fun of putting together a list like this. After all there's no real "best" or "worst" Pink Floyd song and the format is just made for people to read and say "I can't believe that asshole ranked "Pow R Toc H" below "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast"!"

I'm also pretty happy with the way it does wind up running the critical gamut without becoming repetitive or tedious. I couldn't have possibly written it in the order I posted it. I just wrote little blurbs on every song, album by album, and only after that threw together a ranking and reordered the blurbs to fit (using a little bit of creative latitude so what the reader wouldn't have to plow through ten songs from "The Wall" in a row). Trying to write thirty Pink Floyd track disses in a row would have finished me!

Pink Floyd are a good band for this sort of approach. First because there is such a wide range of quality in their songs - there have always been those people who insist that the worst song by their favorite band is "better than 90% of the other crap that passes for music today". I have never been convinced by, or respected, this point of view. Second because while they have "good albums" and "bad albums" it's possible to write about them without sticking an entire album's worth of material at the bottom - I couldn't do a write-up like this on Zep, much as I love them, because the bottom of the list would be pretty much nothing but "In Through The Out Door", which is no more fun to write than is to read.

Personally I think some of my favorites (both songs, and write-ups) are in the middle section. Savaging something like "Seamus" is relatively easy and fun, but the stuff in the '70s and '60s typically presented more of a challenge for me. Hardest of all to write about for me were songs like "Shine On" and "Echoes", which really are worthy of unqualified and hyperbolic praise. I have a tougher time explaining why something is great than explaining why something is bad. Also tough: Avoiding overrunning my reviews with trivia. I was definitely trying to write this for the benefit of people who weren't necessarily obsessives. No idea if I succeeded.

not an obsessive but this is easily one of the best things I've read about Pink Floyd, thanks for doing it

the glaring illumination of bad tracks and band member weaknesses made me laugh a lot and also clarified why Pink Floyd rules