'Wish You Were Here': Still mad at the machine

Wish you were here and looking up from your phone. (Photo credit: pinterest)

In June 1975, Pink Floyd was mixing a song about a lost bandmate, when a heavyset man with a shaved head and no eyebrows walked into the studio and sat down. 

They didn’t recognize him.

It was Syd Barrett, the founding member they’d lost years earlier. He was in the room and they were still singing about missing him.

That’s the whole album in one scene. Everyone is present. Nobody is here.

Wish You Were Here came out in September 1975, made by David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason. It’s a record about the music industry eating its own and about what it feels like to be somewhere and not be there. 

Fifty-one years later, it reads like a university group chat.

Start with the machine. “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar” take aim at an industry that loves the product and has no idea who made it. The label exec in the second song is so out of touch he can’t tell the band members apart.

Swap in unpaid internships paid in “exposure,” burnout dressed up as hustle and an algorithm deciding what’s worth hearing and the songs stop feeling like history. 

On this campus, we’ve even watched a machine make the poster while the artist gets cut out. Welcome to the machine, now with student debt.

Then there’s the title track, the one everyone knows and the one that hurts the most. It’s about presence. Two people can be in the same room and be a million miles apart.

That’s doomscrolling in a lecture, A group chat instead of a coffee.

The song doesn’t shout about any of this. It just sits there, quietly, like the friend who notices.

And then the joke, because there’s always a joke. Pink Floyd made one of the most scathing anti-corporate albums ever recorded and it sold millions of copies through a record company.

The machine got a hit out of its own roast. If that isn’t capitalism.

But the album’s heart isn’t the satire. It’s Barrett. The band lost a friend to something bigger than any of them and they spent a record trying to say so.

The one thing the documented story supports is that he was gone by the time they finished, even while sitting in the room.

That’s why it still lands. We’re all a little absent right now, tired, scrolling, performing, being okay. Pink Floyd’s answer was to write a song that says the only honest thing left: Wish you were here.

Put your phone down. Put the record on.