The Final Cut

“Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters slams ‘rogues and thieves’ who run free streaming sites and steal from musicians,” the London Daily Mail reports:

Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters has slammed the ‘rogues and thieves’ who run free streaming sites, saying they make it impossible for young musicians to earn a living.

The songwriter and guitarist said the power of the digital music providers in Silicon Valley makes him ‘angry’ as they ‘steal’ from musicians and use the money to buy mega-yachts and planes.

‘These… thieves! It’s just stealing! And that they’re allowed to get away with it is just incredible,’ he said in an interview for The Times Saturday Review.

So now Waters is angry with theft? When the Argentinian junta seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, as Mark Steyn wrote in Margaret Thatcher’s obit two decades later, “After Vietnam, the fall of the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, and Soviet annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Grenada, the British routing of the Argentine junta stunned everyone from the politburo in Moscow to their nickel ’n’ dime clients in the presidential palaces, all of whom had figured the ‘free world’ no longer had any fight in it.” It certainly stunned Waters; his last album with Pink Floyd, 1983’s The Final Cut, is a dated, dreary recitatif on how horrible it was for Britain to fight to protect its property, made tolerable in spots only through its beautiful production, soaring guitar solos by bandmate (and future Floyd leader) Dave Gilmour and orchestral arrangements by the late Michael Kamen.

And don’t get the insufferable Waters started by mentioning to him the importance of Israel protecting its borders from theft and terrorism. He was reduced to playing the infamous I have “many very close Jewish friends” trope after refusing to play Israel, railing on against the “Jewish lobby,” which he described as “extraordinarily powerful,” and flying what one concertgoer described as “a black balloon in the shape of a wild pig – bearing a Jewish Star of David as well as symbols of dictatorial regimes from around the world” above the audience at a 2013 show in Belgium.

Funny though, when confronted with theft of his own property, Waters is quick to anger and fighting back. But then, as Cold War historian Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”