If there's one thing that's true about the rock and roll biz, it's that fans and critics oftentimes disagree. An album that's initially slammed by music publications like Rolling Stone might go on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time...and that's exactly what happened with a particularly beloved Pink Floyd record.
When it was released in 1975, expectations were high for Wish You Were Here, the follow-up to 1973's now-iconic Dark Side of the Moon. Decades later, Wish You Were Here is considered to be not just one of Pink Floyd's best albums but one of the most important albums in rock history; however, that's not what critics thought when they first heard it.
As Glenn Povey wrote in Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd, the now-defunct British music magazine Melody Maker slammed Wish You Were Here for a particularly surprising reason, given Pink Floyd's reputation for musical innovation: a "lack of imagination."
"From whichever direction one approaches Wish You Were Here, it still sounds unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity and displays a critical lack of imagination in all departments," the magazine's review complained.
Rolling Stone's review of the album, meanwhile, took issue with what would become one of Pink Floyd's most beloved songs ever: the Syd Barrett tribute "Shine on You Crazy Diamond."
"'Shine on You Crazy Diamond'" is initially credible because it purports to confront the subject of Syd Barrett, the long and probably forever lost guiding light of the original Floyd," the review stated.
"But the potential of the idea goes unrealized; they give such a matter-of-fact reading of the goddamn thing that they might as well be singing about Roger Waters's brother-in-law getting a parking ticket," the review continued. "This lackadaisical demeanor forces, among other things, a reevaluation of their relationship to all the space cadet orchestras they unconsciously sired. The one thing those bands have going for them, in their cacophonously inept way, is a sincere passion for their 'art.' And passion is everything of which Pink Floyd is devoid."
'Wish You Were Here' is now considered one of Pink Floyd's best albums
Of course, history proved the critics wrong...and then some. At the time of this writing, Wish You Were Here's title track has been streamed nearly 1 billion times on Spotify, and in the years since its initial release, even the critics have changed their tune (Rolling Stone, for example, has included the album on not one but three different "greatest albums of all time" lists, and Ultimate Classic Rock deemed it the second-best Pink Floyd album (after Dark Side of the Moon).
The band members are pretty fond of Wish You Were Here, too; in a recent video shared by Pink Floyd's official TIkTok account, it was revealed that Richard Wright and David Gilmour "called it their favorite Floyd record, a quiet masterpiece born from exhaustion, sadness, and love.”
Clearly, Pink Floyd knew what they were doing all along...it just took the critics a little while to catch on.
Related: David Gilmour Refuses to Play This Beloved Pink Floyd Song for Tragic Reason
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