Oct 20, 2011 - Eds note: Pink Floyd mastermind Roger Waters is readying his seventh studio album, Is This The Life We Really Want?, for release this Friday. Being the quintessential album rock band, Pink Floyd hasn't had much luck with 'best-of' and 'greatest-hits' compilations, like A Collection of Great Dance Songs and the bizarro follow-up, Works. If Led Zeppelin were the band most responsible for hard rock's vertical expansion in the '70s, hitting previously unforeseeable heights for the genre, were the band that expanded it the most horizontally. Obviously, they stretched out the length -- double albums, side-long jams, songs that had more movements and ideas than entire LPs by other bands. But they also broadened the music's width, with one of the most far-reaching musical palettes of any band approaching their magnitude. Starting with the Syd Barrett-stewarded kaleidoscopic psychedelia Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967 -- a half-century old this Saturday (Aug. 5) -- the band showed a truly staggering artistic flexibility and open-eared inventiveness, for which they remain oddly underrated in an era that increasingly views them as stodgy, cerebral rock puritans. Yes, they set the standard for college-dorm stoner rock with the prismatic prog of The Dark Side of the Moon, but in between the LP's space-rock zone-outs are a pulse-racing proto-EDM instrumental, a heart-stopping soul vocal exorcism and a couple ripping sax solos. Yes, Wish You Were Here is overwhelmed by a combined 26 minutes and nine movements of jazzy art-funking (and no shortage of fretting about The Machine), but it's also centered around the profound humanity of one of the great tear-jerking ballads in rock history. Yes, the '77 punk movement largely followed in response to the overblown pomposity of their ilk, but play Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and Animals back to back and see which one sounds more like a bilious screed from a bunch of pissed-off Britons who don't give a f--k what their fans want to hear. And yes, The Wall was a monstrous double-LP statement of egomania from which there was no returning, but the set's rock operatics couldn't obscure the most seamless integration of disco's thump that any major rock band had yet achieved -- resulting in a Hot 100 No. 1 rock fans didn't even bother to cry 'sell out!' With their debut album turning 50 this week, we've decided to count down our choices for the 50 best Pink Floyd songs -- from the proggiest to the poppiest to the most psychedelic, and the mini-masterpieces that were all three and more. Shine on, you lunatic vegetable men. ( The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973) A fascinatingly ahead of its time interstitial: 'On the Run' basically feels like interstellar chase music, or a decade-early soundtrack for the action scenes in TRON, or 'Flight of the Bumblebee' as imagined by Giorgio Moroder. Not much song here to speak of, exactly, but the number of doors-of-perception this must've opened for music fans in the early '70s is hard to fathom. ( The Wall, 1979) Careful with that axe, Roger! The Pink Floyd frontman's screaming-in-a-hotel-room voice would well wear out its welcome by the time he left the band a half-decade later -- if not by the end of The Wall's 81 minutes -- but the first time it tears through one of the album's more sedate-seeming tracks ('Would you like to learn to fly?/ WOULD YA LIKE TO SEE ME TRY??' ), it's legitimately unnerving. ( The Early Years 1965-'72, 2016) Originally recorded in 1965 and not officially released for another half century, 'Double O Bo' saw the band tributing early hero Bo Diddley in typically perverse fashion: With a mutant Diddley groove and a narrative about Bo as a super-cool super agent who drinks himself to death. It would soon never define them again, but you wish the band coulda carried at least a crumb of this smart-alecky inside-jokiness into their brutally self-serious dominant period. ![]() Gibson guitar serial number search. ( The Final Cut, 1983) Speaking of brutally self-serious -- 1983's The Final Cut required a major emotional investment in spending time in Roger Waters' headspace to make it through all 46 somber, self-indulgent minutes. Occasionally the on-record majesty approaches the drama storming in Waters' brain, though, as on 'The Gunner's Dream,' a Spectoral ballad with Springsteen-like stakes (and sax!) and a relatively poignant lyric about a gunner's peaceful fantasies ('You can relax on both sides of the tracks') in the seconds before his shot-down plane crashes to his death. ( The Division Bell, 1994) In this case, 'It' appears to apply to the eternally ringing style of guitar patented by The Edge of U2, but arguably pioneered by Floyd six-string wizard David Gilmour on The Wall's 'Run Like Hell.'
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