The historiography of rock reserves a disruptive chapter for the year 1977when The punk insurrection threatened the rock establishment. On the one hand, the bands with three chords and a lot of bad grapes, and on the other, those baptized as ‘dinosaurs’, accused of being egocentric, pretentious and slow-witted. As pink floyda group that, in those days, it was convenient to publicly carve to appear in the photo as a ‘cool’ guy.
Let’s see, The shock of ’77 had refreshing effectsbecause he warned the aristocracy that they could not take anything for granted, he counterprogrammed the power of the ‘majors’ and recalled that rock’n’roll could be exciting in its reduction to expressive minimums. But, with distance, it is easy to see that neither the attitude (punk’s fetish word) was everything nor the generation then labeled as ‘old school’ (whose members had barely turned 30) deserved to be treated like a bunch of dead people. living Pre-punk gigantism produced monstersand in turn ‘do it yourself’ fueled some nice poorly played mediocrities.
I don’t know if the participants in this will agree with all this. album‘Punk Floyd – A tribute to Pink Floyd‘, or if his sudden declaration of love is intended to seal an old regret. Just as many ’90s alternative rock stars had grown up glued to (suddenly despised) AOR and heavy metal records, there are signs that more than one ‘punkie’ had been a fan of Roger Waters’ troop. That drive to tear down what immediately came before and build your identity on total amendment. Time passes and you realize that maybe you went a little overboard.
Well, 47 years later, we have this album in which up to 17 survivors of the class of ’77 tell us that Pink Floyd’s songs are vindictive. They are there UK Subs, dead boys, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, Jah Wobble, Anti-Nowhere League, The Vibrators… Seeing is believing. Fiery versions, without apparent irony. Perhaps it is a pedagogical corrective and they are telling us that this was the correct way to play those songs, with clean guitars, without atmospheric keyboards, dramatic pauses or mystical ‘crescendos’. Which reminds us that the song is that diabolical artifact that can be loved or hated just by altering the instrumental textureor the ‘tempo‘, or the arrangementand that in music we love to get lost in the esthetic and build from there our entire world, so deep and unfathomable.
