When One of Your Favorite Artists Is a Complete Asshat
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters is a megalomaniac and a willing stooge for Putin—but he can’t make me not love his ex-band’s musical canon.
They say never meet your heroes. They’re just people, even the best of them are flawed. If they’re your “hero,” there’s a good chance they’re someone else’s, too. And hero worship can easily go to one’s head.
Thankfully, for all my hang-ups, neuroses, and idiosyncrasies, I’ve mostly avoided falling into the trap of idol worship.
Naturally, there are writers, musicians, and filmmakers whose work I adore, athletes whose talents I admire from afar, and intellectuals whose contributions I consider vital to understanding humanity. But when I see one of them in public, with rare exception, my instinct never says, “Introduce yourself.”
For one thing, it vacuums out the air of mystery—the person, in a fleeting social exchange, will never be as fascinating as their work. For another, as an introvert often lost in my own thoughts, the idea of strangers constantly busting my balls in public because they think I owe them my attention strikes me as a particularly gruesome ring of hell. So I separate the work from the artist, and I leave famous strangers the hell alone.
Some people can’t or won’t divorce the human from the legend. There are those who are no longer able to enjoy any movie associated with Woody Allen or Kevin Spacey. Or they can’t listen to The Smiths anymore because of Morrissey’s pivot to fascism. Or they burned their Dixie Chicks records because their singer said mean things about George W. Bush at the start of the Iraq War.
That’s their right. Everyone’s got a line.
But if you must jettison every artist for having disagreeable politics and/or being unbearable assholes in general—you’re going to be left with a very bland artistic palette. Your standup comic will be apolitical, agreeable, and safe as milk—Jimmy Fallon. Your soul singer will be Justin Timberlake. Your rapper will be pre-Oscars slap Will Smith. Your political satirist will be Andy Borowitz.
That doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally struggle to separate my favorite artists and their contemptible actions.
Take Roger Waters—renowned as an unbearable asshole in many personal and professional relations, *and* a possessor of astoundingly vile politics.
The lyrical and conceptual impresario behind the vast majority of Pink Floyd’s discography has a well-deserved reputation as an impossible, arrogant, overbearing prick (an image he seems to perversely delight in perpetuating). And while he’s always been obnoxiously political (in that his political expressions are abrasive to the point of being bad for the cause for which he advocates), over the past decade he’s gone to some pretty despicable places, politically.
Waters fancies himself an “antiwar” human rights activist, but he’s got a soft spot for barbarous authoritarians—as long as they are of the “anti-imperialist” variety, like Venezuelan tyrant Nicolas Maduro.
Over the past few years, Waters parroted propaganda straight from the office of murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, calling the White Helmets—an NGO of volunteers assisting Syrian civilians besieged by Assad’s bombs—”a fake organization fronting for terrorists.” A longtime advocate for Palestinian rights and strident critic of the Israeli government, Waters has increasingly stepped over the line from legitimate political dissent and into using blatantly antisemitic tropes.
And during an October 2022 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience—the wildly popular podcast and go-to repository for faux-intellectual conspiracy theorizing—Waters said that Israel is “absolutely trying to create another intifada, so they can make it an armed conflict where they’re a thousand times, 10,000 times more powerful than the Palestinian people…so they can just kill them all.”
If that weren’t sufficiently gross, stupid, and unhelpful to the cause of Palestinian self-determination—Waters referred to the antisemitic, fascist, theocratic organization Hamas as the “democratically elected government of Gaza.”
Yes, Hamas defeated the corrupt, then-ruling Fatah party in one Palestinian election in 2006, which led directly to a Palestinian civil war. But neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority have held a free “national” election since, and Hamas has regularly murdered people accused of being gay and kills or imprisons any Palestinians who they believe “collaborate” with Israel—which could be as benign as having a Zoom conversation with Israelis across the Gaza border.
Most recently, Roger Waters served as an agent of Vladimir Putin. This isn’t hyperbole. On Wednesday he spoke via video to the United Nations Security Council—at the invitation of the Russian government.
I had the privilege this week of editing a piece for The Daily Beast by the socialist writer (and fellow Pink Floyd obsessive) Ben Burgis, who laid into Waters’ appalling U.N. address.
I’ll excerpt a bit of it here:
Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters spoke (via video) to the United Nations yesterday, calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine. I agree with that message. And for whatever it’s worth, I’m a massive Pink Floyd fan. I wanted to love the speech.
But my heart sank when I heard Waters blandly refer to the “Russian Federation” while calling Ukraine’s government “the Kyiv Regime.” And the ugly and absurd fact hovering over his otherwise moving speech was that he was speaking at the invitation of Russia—the party that started the war in the first place.
As a matter of pragmatism, Roger Waters is doing peace advocates no favors. He’s just making it easier for western hawks to smear anyone who calls for de-escalation and diplomacy as a “Putin apologist.” And as a matter of morality, blurring the line between a genuine anti-war position and support for the Russian side of the conflict is a giant middle finger to the people who most deserve our support—the brave and persecuted anti-war movement within Russia itself…
So when I see Roger Waters speak at the invitation of the government that started the war, and I see the absurd spectacle of Russia’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy—a man whose job is to justify Putin’s decision to plunge the world into this mess in the first place—praise Waters as “anti-war,” I get very angry, because the whole stupid spectacle is an insult to genuinely anti-war voices and a gift to the hawks, served up on a silver platter with whatever’s left of Waters’ rock-god glamor as a garnish.
We desperately need a credible push for peace. The antics of Roger Waters are just one more barrier to that happening—another brick in the wall.
Moving from the political to the professional (with some overlap in between), it’s worth noting that Waters—who acrimoniously left Pink Floyd in 1985, then was bitterly stunned that the band continued successfully without him—did not appreciate his former bandmates reuniting last year for a one-off single called, “Hey Hey Rise Up,” a collaboration with Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk, the proceeds from which went to Ukrainian civilian charities.
Keyboardist and founding member Richard Wright died in 2008, but the other two surviving members of Pink Floyd have used different methods for dealing with Waters over the past decade-plus.
Drummer Nick Mason maintained a close personal friendship with Waters, the latter of whom made a stunning guest appearance at one of Mason’s solo project shows at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2019. (I was there, he sang the haunting “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” For Floydheads like me, it was a Beatles reunion-level moment.)
But David Gilmour—the Floyd’s lead guitarist, primary vocalist, and de facto music director (because Roger, though a brilliant lyricist and conceptual artist, frequently treated the music as an ancillary annoyance)—remains Roger’s sworn enemy.
It was Gilmour who took the reins of the band when Waters left. And Roger’s solo albums—frequently tuneless, maudlin, and unlike the sublime poetry he wrote for the Floyd, overstuffed with all-too-literal lyrics—showed just how vital Gilmour’s musical input was to Pink Floyd’s craft.
Though relations between the two had thawed a bit in the early 2010s—when Waters and Gilmour traded friendly guest appearances at each others’ shows, including a benefit for Palestinian children hosted by Gilmour—they’ve now never been worse.
Gilmour’s wife (and primary lyricist since the Waters breakup), Polly Samson, took a five-fingered swing at Waters on Twitter this week: “Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”
Gilmour had been (up to this point) almost pathological in his efforts to stay above the fray and not respond to Waters’ many pointed barbs over the years. But he retweeted Samson, adding: “Every word demonstrably true.”
During their musical estrangement, Gilmour frequently praised and paid homage to Waters’ conceptual vision, even thanking him at the end of shows on Pink Floyd’s final tour in 1994-5. Waters, conversely, rarely missed an opportunity to belittle his former bandmates.
The late Richard Wright wrote two of the band’s most indelible songs—”Great Gig in the Sky” and “Us and Them,” both off of the legendary Dark Side of the Moon album, which is about to mark its 50th anniversary.
Gilmour co-wrote the music to many more of the band’s essential tracks, none more notable than “Comfortably Numb,” which is best-known for its two epic, heartbreaking, and soaring guitar solos. There’s a reason the song closed Pink Floyd’s concerts until their mid-90s end, and continues to be the final encore at Gilmour’s shows (and many of Waters’ shows) to this day.
Here’s Gilmour, three days after Prince’s death in 2016, slipping a “Purple Rain” solo in the middle of “Comfortably Numb”:
Put simply: Dark Side of the Moon isn’t all that special, much less an all-time classic, without Gilmour and Wright. Their vocal and instrumental contributions were the bed upon which Waters’ poetry and concepts could lie. “Comfortably Numb” without the guitar solos is a pretty song, but not exceptional. And what exactly would “Echoes” be without Gilmour and Wright’s harmonizing throughout?
And yet, here’s what Waters had to say in a recent interview with The Telegraph about his former bandmates’ contributions:
“Gilmour and Rick [Wright]? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists…They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” Speaking of Gilmour specifically, Waters said, “They said I was autocratic…You play the guitar and sing and do as you’re bloody well told.”
And in an act of both delusion and pettiness—as well as doing his level best to live up to the megalomaniac label—Waters re-recorded some of Pink Floyd’s classics, including Dark Side of the Moon and “Comfortably Numb”—without the guitar solos.
“I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap,” Waters told The Telegraph. ”Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!”
I could go on forever about the Floyd, but the reason I'm writing about them today is this: Roger Waters has lost his goddamn mind.
And while this may sound fanciful, I believe when my generation (the last pre-internet teenagers raised on classic rock radio because we had few other options) is gone, there will be three bands from the 1960s and 1970s rock heyday whose music will remain popular: The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd.
This is in no way meant to disparage the Rolling Stones, The Who, David Bowie or *most* of the other late greats.
It's just that the Beatles will be close to eternal. As long as guitar-based pop music exists, there will be Beatles. The Grateful Dead are rock's equivalent of hockey. There are no casual fans. You either despise them, don't care about them, or are obsessed with them. And there are enough of the last to sustain the music once all the originals are gone.
And then there's Pink Floyd. Why will they last?
Pink Floyd is about a mood, a vibe, losing yourself in long instrumentals, listening to an album from start to finish, standing mesmerized by their incredible lights and films at live shows. Because the sights and sounds defined the band, its members could afford to be semi-anonymous as “rock stars,” in fact they preferred it that way. The music’s atmospheric trance-like quality (“Hear the softly spoken magic spells”), the ahead-of-its-time use of electronic instrumentation, and yes, Roger Waters’ beautiful, timeless, achingly personal yet universal poetry, are why this massively popular (yet often seen as “niche”) band’s music will endure. (Young people continue to discover the Floyd all the time, and can’t believe this music was popular in their grandparents’ day.)
Will I forget those lonely high school days, high on shitty ditch weed, sitting on a beanbag chair at a friend’s house, listening to Meddle under a blacklight—carried by the music into the deepest parts of my imagination?
Will I forget stuffing myself into cars with my friends to drive into the city on a Friday night to check out the Pink Floyd laser shows at the Hayden Planetarium? Do I still get a laugh at the fact I spent countless hours engaging in asinine arguments over whether the Floyd intended to sync Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz? (They didn’t.)
Will I ever get to the point that “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” doesn’t put a catch in my throat, as I recall my childhood best friend and fellow Pink Floyd fanatic—a true crazy diamond—who took his own life at 27?
No, I won’t. And asshole though he may be, none of these joyful memories happen without Roger Waters’ talent, ambition, and relentless drive. I won’t let his assholery ruin the music for me.
I’m done paying for his product, no more shows for me, but I won’t throw the baby out with the bath water, nor will I throw out the art with the asshole artist.
BONUS: My favorite podcast, Political Beats, invited me to shoot the shit about Pink Floyd’s entire discography in 2017. I almost never re-listen to my own media appearances, but I revisit this one about once a year because it sparks joy. Check it out below.
Waters speaks the truth. Not taking sides. Calling it down the middle. Good man. Good heart. Calls bull on both sides. People cannot handle that he does not go with the forced narrative.
Waters is an arrogant dude with an holier than thou attitude, but he’s not being antisemitic for supporting Palestinians and rejecting Zionism. Palestinians are semites and deserve to be free from their Zionist Israeli oppressors. Call it what it is. Stop bringing a coward.