DISCLAIMER: This has nothing to do with the really bad stuff that Waters has been doing on his latest live tour. That's a separate issue from this one and I'll probably tackle it at some point at a later date, most likely around the time the full tour is over.
so here i was, browsing my youtube recommends like a normal individual, and what hits in my face?
a new version of Money from Dark Side of the Moon? Done for an upcoming redux version of that album?
what could go wrong?
let's get three things out of the way real quick:
- i'm a mega-fan of Pink Floyd, and consider them one of the best prog acts in history
- DSotM is my second favorite album from them behind The Wall
- this version fucking blows chunks
Waters has been on a really weird crusade to make everything he touches these days into the most melodramatic stuff imaginable, with the best (somewhat) recent example being his album from 2017, Is This The Life We Really Want?
now, i actually decently like that album! i think the melodrama fits with it, considering that it's a pretty politically charged work that tackles a lot of subjects from that point in time. it's not as good as his work during PF of course, but i would argue it's one of his better works in recent years
what separates that from the new version of Money, and why the latter blows so many chunks in comparison, is pretty easy to explain: not only is Is This The Life an album that mixes melancholy with actual energy, but it's also not shitting on the legacy of a song that's, oh, you know, on the fourth most sold album in history?
but there's more to why Money Redux sucks balls, and this is when we kinda have to dive into the original album more
the new version has a couple of core issues to it, namely that
- it's taking one of the three fast-paced songs on the album and turning it into a slow chore, which includes
- removing the solo, which was (in my opinion) the best solo from the entire album, and
- replacing it with an out-of-place spoken word bit that not only feels really tacked on but also hurts the original message of the song!
if you're not familiar with the original version (you should be, it's absolutely fantastic), the song has a sarcastic tone to it, and satirizes the decadent, often borderline degenerate lifestyles of rich people, using lyrics like "I'm alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack!" and "I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set, and I think I need a Learjet". it's a song that, while initially sounding like it's glorifying wealth, is actually a sneaky critique of it
so what does Waters do with this, 50 years later? simple! he adds a 5-minute long spoken word section about... a boxing match? it feels like a complete non-sequitur, or it would feel like it, had it not been for the fact that it would render 5/7 of the song into a non-sequitur
this song blows. it's a bad rendition of a beloved classic that's made to be melodramatic for no real reason other than the very obvious petty anger that Waters has toward David Gilmour for kicking him out of Pink Floyd 40 years ago, and even when listened on its own and not compared to it's original rendition (which is a hard task when we're talking about ***a song from Dark Side of the Fucking Moon here), it's still a shitty song that goes on for way too long for its own good
and he's making an entire album like this? god, i can't wait for that to come out so i can rip it to pieces like a true animal.
4.5/10
