I HATE PINK FLOYD
Looking For Anti-Floyd Sentiments On The Web.
By Rick Karhu
I was bored--what can I say I went to Yahoo recently and typed +"I Hate Pink Floyd" into the search form and found 13 pages bearing that sacrilegious phrase. I laughed to myself and took a few moments to run through the pages to see what was going on here. Who in their right mind would dare to utter such insanity?
• The first site turned out to be a rather favorable review of Symphonic Pink Floyd: Us And Them by Sandy Atwal, although the reviewer singled out the album's conductor, Jaz Coleman (of Killing Joke) for a bit of derision on the basis that he didn't do an entire Floyd album (hadn't thought about that.) The unspeakable phrase (or rather a permutation of it) is actually at the end of the article and isn't quite what I was looking for. "Of course if you hate Pink Floyd, then you have no soul and shouldn't bother picking this up either." Well, duh on both counts.
Malcolm McClaren actually wanted Syd Barrett to produce the Sex
Pistols' album.
• The next item I found was a post to something billing itself The Pink Floyd Hyper Newsgroup (which I assume is some kind of Floyd-related chat group for people with some sort of nervous condition. Anyone know?) The poster writes: "Although Johnny Rotten wore a 'I Hate Pink Floyd' t-shirt, Malcom McClaren actually wanted Syd Barrett to produce the Sex Pistols' album." (Do any readers know if McClaren's plan to have Barrett produce the Sex Pistols' album was for real or yet another Floydian urban legend?)
• Next was a subpage to a site called "Counterculture" which puts forth the radical theory that MTV has had a negative impact on culture. Let's all say it together: "No shit!"
I did turn up this interesting tidbit from that page:
British Punks: 1976-1979
by Autumn Daughetee
The summer of 1976 gave birth, and a voice, to a subculture whose very existence marked the beginning of a revolution. The foot soldiers and generals alike in this revolution were working class kids from around Britain who had been discarded by those whose attention they sought to capture. The punks, as they were dubbed by the press, used highly creative and new styles of dress and music to demand that the world pause and listen to what they had to say. They were pained and angry and they dramatically changed the face of music, popular society and politics.
The subculture the punks created was deeply concerned with fashion and music. These were the two main modes of expressions for their group. An anecdote concerning Johnny Rotten's discovery perfectly illustrates the importance placed on fashion, or rather anti fashion by the punks. According to Rotten, "The punk thing started pretty much non musically. Bernie Rhodes spotted me wearing my 'I Hate Pink Floyd' T-shirt on King's Road and asked me to come back that night to meet Malcolm, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook in the Roebuck pub on King's Road (Lydon, 1994 p. 74)." . . .Punks dressed in garbage bags, discarded uniforms, safety pins, bondage gear and shredded clothes (Brake, 1985). Hair was died bright colors with Crazy Color, the preferred, it was cheap, hair dye of punks (Lydon, 1994). Hair was also cut quite short for the first time in years. Many punks combined this short hairstyle with mohawks and liberty spikes.
The punks created an image that was, quite honestly, ugly. . . .Greil Marcus (1989) in "Lipstick Traces" wrote "everything was now a matter of ugliness, evil and error, of repulsion, repression, and bondage--sex, love . . . traffic, advertising--and everything was all of one piece (p. 70)." The ugliness on the outside was a manifestation of the ugliness within; a tool to reject the world that was being forced upon them.
Which once again furthers my personal theory that the Sex Pistols would have been nobody if it weren't for Pink Floyd. (Just kidding... kinda.)
Johnny "Not So Fresh" Lydon. Does he really hate Pink Floyd or
did his mother not hug him enough? His anti-Floyd t-shirt launched
a career.
• I was completely baffled by the next site with the offending phrase as it turned out to be in Spanish which for me (speaking only English and Français) is totalement inutile. It is rather funny perusing a Spanish article about the Sex Pistols though, scanning through it for all the "Fuck you's that didn't translate. Here's the snippet my search hit upon:
"Conta a lenda que Lydon foi imediatamente integrado na banda ao entrar na loja de Malcom usando uma camisa com os dizeres 'I Hate Pink Floyd' e se dispor a fazer um teste acompanhando uma jukebox."
Once again, no mierda! (Interestingly, if my Spanish is up to scratch, I think this recounts the fabled incident where Lydon was spotted wearing his "I Hate Pink Floyd" pancho.)
Which once again furthers my personal theory that the Sex Pistols would have been nobody if it weren't for Pink Floyd. (Just kidding... kinda.)
• Next up was the startlingly accurately named " Jason's Music Page " at which, interestingly enough, outlined the musical preferences of someone named Jason. I would venture a guess that Jason has investments in some national brand pain killers since his psychedelic background pattern instantly gave me the biggest migraine I've ever had. Here's the offending phrase; again, not really what I was after:
"I haven't met many people in my life who can say they absolutely
HATE Pink Floyd. Their music has a style all its own. Everyone
has their specific Floyd tastes as well.... mine happens to be
"Meddle". You can find out almost anything-Floydian by clicking
above." (The above link was dead, by the way, which leads me to
think this guy is saying "You can find out almost anything Floydian
by being dead.")
• The Harvard Salient was the next stop. It yielded this stuffy review from their Transient Points, evidently an online source of wisdom for those who have finally grown tired of physical masturbation. Although I can see where this guy is coming from... well, that's probably a bad choice of words, isn't it? Anyway, it's not really what I was looking for.
The Baby Boom generation is now officially passé, at the same time that it officially has both political and cultural power. Only in the Clinton administration would one celebrate the release of "Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd." As one could guess from the title, this album features the tragically pretentious "greatest Floyd hits," as performed by the Royal Symphony Orchestra. Hearing sample sound bites inspired in me the same visceral hatred I felt the first time I ever heard an instrumental cover of a Rolling Stones song on Muzak. The main differences here are that Muzak is passively endured rather than actively bought, and that I once actually liked the Stones.
Baby Boomers now buy tiny foreign luxury cars with "comfy" seats. It is only fitting that the band that recorded "Comfortably Numb" has been elevated to the status of high culture, now that the enlightened whiners from the 1960s control the haughty life of academia, attacking Great Books by expounding on "how this relates to Emerson (or, for my acquaintances unfortunate enough to major in English, Foucault)." The audience for classical music, and its performers, used to be limited to old people and Salient editors. Now that the Baby Boomers, not so long after bankrupting our Social Security fund, have appropriated it, we can see that the message of rebellion is, like so much about the Sixties, a charade.
This epiphany leads to strange bedfellows. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols is said to have been "discovered" in the late 1970s while hanging around London with a homemade "I HATE PINK FLOYD" T-shirt. It is hard to see at first what conservatives and punk rockers have in common, but both are authentic; both fiercely espouse individualism without, one would hope, being sanctimonious about it; and both can see through sham. The past two years have witnessed the rise of Newt Gingrich, and the related rise of Green Day. Campus political protests have become, of all things, banal, while "classic rock" stations struggle to avoid joining the era they celebrate on the ashheap of history. When the last Eagles reunion tour finally ends, when the last Deadhead finally decides to get a life, I can only say "good riddance."
(Matt Bruce)
A fine theory which, albeit half-baked, attempts to unify the two greatest forces of Good, i.e. Green Day and Newt Gingrich. Doesn't really wash with me--I have serious doubts that there's much overlap in the Gingrich and Green Day worshipping demographic although I'd love to be proven wrong for what is probably obvious reasons.
• Next up was a Sex Pistols fan page stuffed to the gills with mushy-gushy reviews of a Sex Pistols show in Canada (humorously enough you could just about replace the words Sex Pistols with Spice Girls and the reviews would read quite nicely.) The page turned up this interesting tidbit, although again, not what I wanted exactly.
By JOHN SAKAMOTO
DENVER, COLO.--Even in a season defined by its perverse lack of an overriding musical direction, the last two people on Earth whom you'd expect to have anything to do with each other are Gene Simmons and Johnny Rotten, the respective frontmen of the summer's two most talked-about reunions.
Yet, here's the head Sex Pistol ("that's SIR Johnny Rotten to you," the inveterate monarchy-basher jokes when we're introduced) saying he not only likes the KISS leader, but actually partied with him recently in L.A.--at a gay club called Rage.
And what exactly was Simmons, the official poster boy for gaudy heterosexuality, doing in a gay club?
"He was tickling my fancy," jokes Rotten, pacing restlessly around a hotel room the day after the opening date of the band's North American tour. ("Tickling his FANNY, more like it," guitarist Steve Jones chimes in from across the room.)
It's hard to imagine Johnny Rotten and Gene Simmons being in the same ROOM together, let alone the same conversation.
"I'm not a snob," says Rotten, making it clear that he detests KISS's music. "What people do musically is up to them. I can still deal with them on a one-to-one basis.
"I mean, I hate Pink Floyd, but I really get on well with Dave Gilmour." (Ironically, Rotten got his first audition with the Pistols back in 1975 after future Clash manager Bernie Rhodes spotted him strolling down King's Road sporting an "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt.)
"(Gilmour) is an adult, and he's able to cope with that. When people CAN'T cope with that," he adds, staring pointedly at me, "you know that deep down inside that they know there's something wrong about what they do."
Now, as anyone who's read any of Rotten's blow-hard pronouncements over the years already knows, this charming "I'm OK, you're a jerk" routine is a staple part of his act. He glares, he insults, he verbally abuses and, if you betray the slightest sign of weakness, he moves in for the kill.
On the other hand, if you take it for the essentially good-natured, albeit twisted, game that it is, you're pretty much guaranteed an entertaining ride.
• Next was a plain old Floyd fan site . Don't bother. It took ages to load this page, and it just lists a lot of lyrics including "One Of My Turns." If the guy wasn't a Floyd fan, I'd flame him. (Just kidding... kinda.) Again, not what I wanted.
• Finally, a site hosting a web version of a mailing list ("Fegmaniax--is that a mailing list or a high-fiber breakfast cereal?") bears out yet another reference to this fabled Sex Pistol shirt ("It is true that Lydon had never dreamed of fronting a band before he was spotted in the Kings' Road wearing an 'I Hate Pink Floyd' T-shirt.")
That t-shirt is attaining the same mythical status as the hat those kids put on Frosty the Snowman to make him come to life. There must have been magic in that t-shirt to have launched a career out of a bunch of smelly British punks with such bad hair.
A bit disappointed that I hadn't found one, single Floyd hater, I searched this page for the word "Pink" and... PAYDIRT! I found what I was looking for. Although it wasn't anywhere near the dreaded search phase, I had found someone who, at long last, hated Pink Floyd.
Subject: Re: first album bought with own money
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 10:32:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Daniel Saunders" (dsaunder@islandNet.com)For me it must have been Division Bell, by Pink Floyd, which just shows my age. I listened to it recently, and it's utter cheese, with some laugh-out-loud lyrics, but there's no accounting for early musical tastes. Oh well.
Daniel Saunders
Life is heaven and hell. All else is silence.
- Robyn Hitchcock
The remaining search hits for +"I hate Pink Floyd" were three dead links and a German page--which just goes to show you what eventually happens to those who utter the unspeakable phrase--you either end up dead or German. Either way, why risk it?
Rick Karhu is Coeditor of Spare Bricks and maintains The Pink
Floyd ROIO Chatter Archive and The Essential Pink Floyd Webring.