Finally, how does he manage to stay neutral in the middle of all this? See Also. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Rolling Stone. Log In. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again.
You are no longer onsite at your organization. Also, I interpreted "Down and out" as a reference to death, an inevitable consequence of war. General Comment I love this song, and while it's about war, on a larger scale, it's about human nature in general.
The four lines at the end " I've always interpreted the old man as a beggar, and the four lines a somber commentarty on how we treat our own people. The " With, Without The man saying " The old man is without, a beggar who doesn't even have the money to buy lunch. We're all human beings, and we're all we have on this Earth, so what's being said is that we should be kinder to one another.
NimEdelweiss on October 12, Link. I didn't interpret "the old man" as a beggar. I interpreted it as a man who is never satisfied with what he has.
NimEdelweiss sgtfloyd on February 17, General Comment It's not about WAR so much as it is about the tendency of humans to fight with each other. Not just on the battlefield, but in every day situations.
If you listen to the Roger the Hat interview, WAters discusses a bit of them meaning behind Us and Them: that we are constantly fighting each other and seperating ourselves into an "us vs. The point is that we unneccessarily divide ourselves based on every little thing, concentrate on our differences, and forget to think about all the ways we're all in this thing together.
So, yes, on a small scale, it's about war, but it's more about human nature in general. Not just the political idea of one country against another, but the very simple idea of one human against another. General Comment Us and them and after all we're only ordinary men me and you God only knows it's not what we would choose to do This is saying that the people you fight against in a war aren't really evil We wouldn't choose to fight, but we have to in order to defend our countries.
Human beings are dying on the whims of the generals, but the generals are detached from that fact because they sit in cushy offices just watching the lines on the map going side to side. The lines are moving side to side because people are dying. Black and blue and who knows which is which and who is who I think this is saying that who is right and who is wrong is really a subjective idea. Both sides believe they are doing what is right. Maybe that people become so detached from their emotions after fighting for awhile that they go crazy and will kill over any little thing.
Zepfreak on March 19, Link. This last part is about an ex soldier. I like to think this song was about WW1 as a lot of the lyrics fit the bill. Us and them, being ordinary, being ordered to attack from the rear, the front rank dying, they wouldn't want to do it, who is who, which is which trench systems were constantly fucked etc.
They wrote a song 'when the tigers broke free' about WW2 so this being a song about WW1 is within reason. Anyway, I think this is about an ex soldier, he is now an old man brushed aside and forgotten about. The war has left him in misfortune even after everything he went through as described in the song; I think the line is ' listen son, said the man with the gun, there's room for you this side' as opposed to 'inside'.
I think this refers to him as a boy being recruited to fight in the great war with someone older, perhaps someone he relies on in the trenches telling him to stand beside him to prepare for an attack.
He's 'down and out' and he's left on the street. All he wants to ask of people is for change, 'asking the price for tea and a slice' is a metaphor or perhaps literal. He is just trying to get by, but withers and dies with old age without a soul to care for him.
For nearly twenty minutes, they stood at their seats, screaming themselves hoarse, determined not to move an inch until Pink Floyd came back onstage. Novices were here because of the Great Floyd Mystique, the tales of concert wonder passed down by elder brothers and old hippie uncles. And the song is so Floydian. It was a perfect way to end the evening. But as usual, he had a couple of heavy axes to grind, among them the threat of nuclear self-destruction and the potential of communications technology as a means to bring people together, two themes central to his latest album, Radio K.
Not surprisingly, Waters ground those axes with the same black humor, theatrical ingenuity and apocalyptic urgency that he brought to the staging of his musical autobiography The Wall, incorporating striking computer graphics, newsreel footage of Armageddon in the making and fictional telephone exchanges between a young spastic boy named Billy and a Kaos Dj, played by real-life radio pro Jim Ladd.
But there was also a matter of honor at stake here. The implication, of course, was unmistakable: anyone else out there playing these songs, claiming to be Floyd, is bogus. Both camps, however, have now taken their cases to the people in a vindictive press war. But the price has been disastrously high. The musicians who created The Wall are now up against a wall of their own — the one separating them from one another.
They resent what each has done to the other, what each has said publicly about the other, what each has exacted from the other emotionally, artistically and financially. If you believe half of what Gilmour and Mason say about their former bassist, Waters is an arrogant, dictatorial egomaniac hungry for all the credit and the subsequent rewards.
The fans, of course, are happy to be getting any Floyd, any Waters, at all. David Gilmour, 41, has heard the snap of those briefcases a lot during the past year. Reclining on a hotel-room sofa one morning after one of the Montreal gigs, Gilmour talks about the Floyd feud with a combination of resignation and stubbornness.
Our assumption — my assumption, anyway — was that we would do another record. Exactly that term. Waters and the other Floyds, particularly Gilmour, had been on a collision course for years, as far back as the making of The Dark Side of the Moon, in It was a question of him having forced his way to that position, of him being very tough and having more energy for that sort of fighting.
Bob Ezrin, who functioned as both coproducer and referee during the making of The Wall he and Gilmour coproduced the new Floyd album as well , says the verbal brawling never escalated to fisticuffs. Waters was, understandably, very possessive of the piece; it was a highly personal exorcism of his obsession with his loss as well as an expression of unbridled outrage at the politicians and generals who casually demand such pointless sacrifices.
My criticisms and objections were constructive in the best possible way. They are the sort of constructive criticisms that made other albums, like The Wall. He threatened to scrap the whole record if the guitarist would not relinquish his position as coproducer. And he was the one who entirely made it miserable, in my opinion. The album, he admits, was originally supposed to be songs left over from the movie version of The Wall. I was on a roll, and I was gone. The fact of the matter was that I was making this record.
And he said so. They wanted it to be a Floyd record. The record came out as a Floyd effort. Any illusion, though, that this trio ever would or ever could work together again was shattered. Waters would have nothing else to do with Gilmour. Gilmour refused to be a mere sessionman in a Waters-led Floyd. Even Nick Mason, who had maintained a personal friendship with Waters and shared his interest in theatrical presentation, allied himself with Gilmour.
That was over three years ago. But the stage was set for the current legal imbroglio. Waters insisted that Pink Floyd as a band, as a musical partnership, was finished. In doing so, Waters was taking a calculated risk that Gilmour and Mason would not continue as the Floyd. I am not going to be hung out to dry in court for years and years while you guys are calling yourselves Pink Floyd. This was two years ago. Believe ME, my life has been anything but quiet for the last two years.
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