Pink Floyd/YMMV


 * Accidental Innuendo: Contrary to popular belief, the name is not a phallic reference. It was named for Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, two of Syd Barrett's favorite blues musicians.
 * Anvilicious: The Final Cut (written entirely by Waters) was released to protest England's involvement in The Falklands War. Meanwhile, Animals makes it pretty clear that Waters doesn't exactly think very highly of capitalism or Moral Guardians.
 * Awesome Music: Now has its own page.
 * Breakaway Pop Hit: The first song of theirs that got any sort of airplay on US pop radio was the 1972 song "Free Four". With the exception of diehard Floyd fans and fans of French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, no one has seen La Vallee, the obscure French hippie film that the song is from the soundtrack of. The soundtrack itself (Obscured by Clouds, which doubled as the band's seventh studio album) is similarly more well known than La Vallee.
 * The band's 1969 third album, Soundtrack from the Film "More" is similarly more well known than the film More (another French hippie film by Barbet Schroeder). In fact, the film wasn't released in the United States and the album was just known as More upon release.
 * Broken Base: Over The Final Cut and the post-Waters albums. In the former case there was a famous example where the editors of a Pink Floyd fan publication voted it their best album in the same issue as the fans voted it their worst. Then there's the matter with Syd Barrett's time with the band; some circles consider this period the only worthwhile moment in Floyd's history, while fans of the classic period consider it, as well as the band's pre-Dark Side work as a whole, an oddity at best.
 * Crazy Awesome: Syd Barrett. Emphasis on the "crazy" part.
 * Critical Backlash: They triggered a big one at the height of their career. NME was the biggest culprit, with a notoriously scathing concert review from the mid-1970s. For the most popular band performing a major Dead Horse Genre, it seems inevitable that critics would run them through a wood chipper.
 * Critical Dissonance: Despite being regularly trashed by some critics (you can find a good review for every Pink Floyd album if you look, and critics mostly ate up their early material; the pastings they would receive in The Seventies were more of the It's Popular, Now It Sucks kind), their albums sold truckloads. The band was eventually Vindicated by History in terms of critical acclaim and are retroactively now one of the most critically adored bands of the seventies. Rolling Stone for instance, named Wish You Were Here the worst album of 1975, but 30-odd years later, included it in the Top 100 of their Greatest Albums of All Time list.
 * Dork Age: The band members themselves see the period between Syd Barrett leaving and the release of Dark Side of the Moon as this.
 * Ending Fatigue: Usually inverted, as the songs take forever to start ("Time", "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"), but played straight sometimes ("Atom Heart Mother").
 * Face of the Band: First Syd, later Roger and David. Partially subverted in that the band strove not to have a "face." This was much easier before the Internet made fans aware of what the band members actually looked like.
 * First Installment Wins: At least according to Barrett fans.
 * Funny Moments: Now has its own page.
 * Harsher in Hindsight: The Final Cut by Pink Floyd is both disturbingly prophetic and harrowing to listen to. Granted, the album was protesting the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands by the UK, but the track "Keep Your Hands of My Desert" features someone (Roger Waters) screaming, "Hey! Keep your hands off my desert!", followed shortly by the sound of an airplane flying over and an explosion. Yikes.
 * "The Great Gig In The Sky," which Richard Wright composed, after his death.
 * Heartwarming in Hindsight: The song "The Final Cut" is packed with subtle references to every album that the band made during the Roger Waters era, with lines like "and beat the dogs..." (Animals), "and cheat the cold electronic eyes..." ("Welcome to the Machine" from Wish You Were Here), "I'll tell you what's behind the wall..." (The Wall), and "if I show you my dark side..." (Dark Side of the Moon). The Final Cut turned out to be Roger's last album. As nasty as the band's breakup was, "The Final Cut" reads like Roger's swan song to the band and a fond look-back at his glory days with them.
 * Hell Is That Noise: Waters' screaming in "Careful With That Axe, Eugene".
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: Waters spitting in a fan's face on the final show of the tour for Animals, which included the lyric "Who was trained not to spit in the fan?" (from "Dogs"). Though if it is funny or not, is up to you.
 * When that concert was bootlegged, the bootleg was predictably named Who Was Trained Not To Spit On The Fan?.
 * I Am Not Shazam: "Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?", as mentioned in the 1975 song, "Have a Cigar".
 * Memetic Mutation:
 * "Shine on, you crazy diamond."
 * Many of their album covers.
 * Most Annoying Sound: An intentional application of this trope, on the long-play record for Atom Heart Mother. The last song, Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast, ends with the sound of dripping from a kitchen tap. On the LP, the groove was made in a loop at the end, so that the needle would continuously play through that dripping sound over and over again until manually lifted off the record or turned off entirely, simulating a leaky faucet in the kitchen in record-form.
 * Nightmare Retardant: The song "Cymbaline" from Soundtrack From the Film "More". Though it is an undeniably somber song, it's actually supposed to describe a nightmare, and "Nightmare" was its working title. Live performances contained a soundscape of "scary" sounds such as footsteps and creaking doors intended to frighten the audience. During one performance a fan sarcastically screamed "I'M SCARED!" during this segment.
 * Replacement Scrappy: Averted with David Gilmour.
 * True Art Is Angsty: Most of the band's work under Roger Waters's tenure, actually.
 * True Art Is Incomprehensible: The studio part of Ummagumma, with the exception of "Grantchester Meadows."
 * Vindicated by History: Like a lot of classic rock bands, including Led Zeppelin, critics hated them in The Seventies but proclaim the band as geniuses today.
 * Yoko Oh No: Gilmour's then-girlfriend, Polly Samson, wrote the lyrics for most of the songs on The Division Bell. Arguably justified as Samson is a professional writer and Gilmour has always considered himself a sub-par lyricist (he asked for help on that front from Anthony Moore as well).