At seventy-nine-years-old, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters hasn’t lost his youthful idealism. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:
Roger Waters’ music and video spectacular is like WikiLeaks set to music: exploding myths, and exposing the ugly reality, writes Joe Lauria.
Roger Water’s “This is Not a Drill.” (Kate Izor)
The show stays outside. The reality is inside the arena.
Roger Waters’ ongoing 40-city North American tour is an eviscerating attack on a pretend America, exposing the nation’s brutality at home and abroad.
In an elaborate production playing on stages across the continent, Waters rips the cover from ruling myths enforced through education and the media, myths he has been fighting his entire life.
He reaches back to the early years to include Pink Floyd songs that were warnings, written during the relatively free 1970s, which looked forward from where we were to where we were headed — the mess we’re in today.
The performance is a startling defense of victims of U.S. state violence, searingly portrayed in video and music: indigenous, homeless, working class and developing world people who have nothing to do with power and how it’s used against them.
Waters argues that elite impunity allows a managed population to be rendered comfortable in its numbness, becoming part of a wall of ignorance erected by the state, behind which it commits its crimes.
Waters smashes that wall.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 