I give very few Fs. More than that, this is my first F-, and it’s of a band that’s kinda culturally revered. In light of that, please forgive the length of this. Anytime I give something a poor rating, I feel I have to justify it somewhat. This is the poorest rating I’ve given, and I expect it’s somewhat contentious, so it’s got a bit of an explanation attached. I’ve been able to keep these down to one paragraph so far but that’s just not gonna work out here, sorry.
Pink Floyd has released 15 studio albums over 47 years. The latter half (maybe two-thirds) of those I don’t like. I don’t necessarily dislike them, but I certainly don’t think they’re very good and I genuinely don’t care for or about them at all. They’re long and boring to an absolute extreme. At best, very middling rock. Maybe they were innovative, maybe they were inspiring— I believe that, truly. But whatever inspiration they left, whatever mark they made, I think it grew well beyond them, because what I hear here is long, bland, and altogether thoroughly uninteresting to my ear. This includes Dark Side of the Moon, this includes The Wall. I thought those two in particular were fine, but reputation aside I would call them utterly unremarkable. The biggest and most consistent failing I find in this chunk of Floyd is that it is so absolutely indulgent. There is so much in here that feels eternal. It is painfully indulgent. Even on songs that are otherwise enjoyable, there’s just no reason they couldn’t have been 3-4 minutes instead of 6-8, and I don’t believe there’s anything that justifies the length, I don’t think the extra time is at all effective to making the songs better. None of that is good, but none of it is worth of an F, either. That reasoning applies to a D, sure, but not an F.
No, the F comes from the first half (maybe a third if I’m being generous) of Floyd’s discography. I dislike it. It’s weird, but it’s not interesting. If it were weird and a little bit unpleasant but still interesting, I could get behind that. I’ve listened to plenty of artists like that. Gorillaz is sometimes like that, Beck is sometimes like that, Radiohead hits that pretty consistently. Even if I don’t like unpleasantly weird but interesting, I can respect it, slap a C on that sucker. But Pink Floyd doesn’t get that. In their first half-dozen albums they feel aimless, which is a rough critique for a band so often praised for their artistic ambition. These albums are long and unsatisfying and not enjoyable. And, they feel… unsettling, they feel off. They feel bad, and wrong somehow. One of my genuine reactions listening to these albums was, “Oh, so this is why old people thought rock was of the devil”. Or, in more modern terms, the vibes are way off. Unsettling, genuinely unsettling, I don’t know that I can describe it better than that. I dislike it, I am opposed to it.
I called the later Pink Floyd albums indulgent; these first albums are indulgent too. I call things indulgent pretty often, it’s one of my go to critiques, and I feel that Pink Floyd might be the most deserving recipient of it so far.
(This paragraph breaks the flow of the writing here pretty bad, so feel free to skip it, but it’s something that annoyed me enough I couldn’t bring myself to leave it out) A very specific example of this indulgence: Not every Pink Floyd album starts with extended silence, but a good chunk do. Sometimes this gradually shifts into quiet ambient noise, sometimes it goes straight into a song after a while. I’m not a fan. It feels artsy for the sake of being artsy— without any useful effect. If you put a pause at the start of any other track than the first, I can understand how that can add space and develop the pace of the album, sure, whatever. But when I press play, it means I’ve started listening. Less than 10 seconds of initial silence I think can be useful, that doesn’t bother me. But if it’s to the point that I’m double and triple checking my sound systems and my Bluetooth connection, turning the volume up and down because I’m worried that my phone is bugging out, I think it’s probably bad. That’s indulgent, I’m decidedly not a fan of that.
Every album, every song, feels eternal, and for the early stuff it feels like nonsense. This is, I think, the first band that I’ve listened to that’s really made me feel not only that it’s “bad” music, but that it’s not music at all. Sometimes I swear it’s like they discovered instruments and went “oh my gosh this thingy makes noises? I bet I can get some cool noises out of this, lemme try to make lots of noises and put it on a record”. The suckiest part of that is, that energy and feeling is strong enough that it permeates through even to the parts that aren’t quite so indulgent. There are tracks that aren’t criminally long or weird or unpleasant, but they get drowned out and tainted by the ones that are. Though, perhaps even that’s being generous to Pink Floyd. It’s telling that I call them “tracks” instead of “songs”. Because “songs” are a specific unit, a specific structure. They’re typically within so many minutes, they typically stay within such and such structure, they typically feature a prominent melody, whatever else. Pink Floyd’s stuff isn’t really made within that “song” frame. It’s too long and too unfocused. And like, I don’t know what else I would call it. It still feels too unfocused for me to call it a “piece” or a “composition” like I would something written for a concert hall or movie or whatever. I know that that’s what prog rock is trying to tap into. It’s trying for “compositions”, and even knowing that I think Pink Floyd absolutely falls flat there. It feels like all I can call them is “tracks”, because sometimes it feels like that’s all they are. These first albums, again, are uniquely bad in that they are both unpleasant and uninteresting, and on top of that they last forever.
All of that, I think, made it pretty easy for me to place it somewhere in the F-range. Pink Floyd is to me, at best, unending but indifferent apathy. At worst, it’s unending and unpleasant apathy. Even then, I was asking myself if the stuff I disliked was really bad enough to warrant being so harsh. Sounding like “not music” is pretty bad, but it’s not, like, actively antagonistic. Were the unsettling parts really so unsettling? Maybe I could at least give it the somewhat gentler F+?
Then I remembered that those early Pink Floyd albums literally gave my dog a panic attack. Twice. He’s never reacted anything like that to anything before or anything since, that’s messed up.
I think an F- will do just fine.
tunafruitsandwitch 
Well said. I concur. Pink Floyd. It was kind of a rite of passage in my growing up. I hold some nostalgia for it. It ain’t all bad. But nothing can outweigh the larger than life downer/darkness/panic attack-inducing-experience it was to listen to their entire catalogue. Boo. F-
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