Pink Floyd: The World's Laziest Band
Pink Floyd are collectively and individually the world's laziest musicians.  Personally, I wish I was a multi-millionaire precisely so I would have the time and resources to sit around and make music, to experiment and put out something as interesting as the Floyd did once upon a time that made them millionaires to begin with.  Such has been anything but the case with these guys in a trend that's continued over the vast majority of their collective careers and my entire life.

The numbers don't lie.  If you plot their albums across time, you can see the shift from a group of guys addicted to experimentation... to a lazy bunch of old fucks who never get around to anything.  Ever since they put out The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, the band has steadily tapered their output to the point that they'll be dead before they're in the studio again.  I mean this in a literal sense since obviously the asymptote carries them over the hill (paradoxically speaking).

Here's the raw data: Album, release date and days since the previous album was issued.

 
Album Release Date Days since last album
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
A Saucerful of Secrets
More (Original Soundtrack)
Ummagumma
Atom Heart Mother
Relics
Meddle
Obscured by Clouds
Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here
Animals
The Wall
The Final Cut
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
The Division Bell
On an Island		 8/5/67
6/28/68
6/27/69
10/25/69
10/10/70
5/14/71
11/13/71
6/3/72
3/24/73
9/15/75
2/2/77
12/2/79
3/21/83
9/8/87
4/5/94
3/6/06		 0
328
364
120
350
216
183
203
294
905
506
1033
1205
1632
2401
4353
With Microsoft Excel being a jerkoff and me being too lazy delete all the Floyd bootleg mp3s that I resort to collecting in lieu to new material so I can have the space to reinstall SPSS, I couldn't run a proper curve fit to predict just when these guys might actually get around to doing something musically more noteworthy than collecting royalty checks.  But at a glance you can tell it won't be anytime soon.

Note that I'm even including David Gilmour's most recent solo album here just to give him a break.

It would be nice if I could offer Roger Waters the same courtesy, but the meglomaniacal fuck hasn't put out a real album since 1992.  Oh, unless you count his greatest hits album (from a solo career noteworthy for its conspicuous absence of hits) or his classical opera (on which he doesn't sing or play any instruments).  I don't think so.

Rick Wright put out a solo album a few years back, but I'm not going to count it.  I mean, he sang on half a track on the Division Bell and has, what?, two or three writing credits on that album (and none on the five preceding it).  He should have had enough free time over the last decade to write several albums in the meantime.

And, no, I'm not counting any of the live albums because, come on, that's just fucking bullshit.  You can't listen to a light show anyway, so I'm not sure what the point of these were.  No, I get it.  They're attempts to make it look like they were actually working.  Look at the graph.  They aren't.



Copyright 2008 Ale[x]plorer.
Back to the index