I thought I knew exactly what this issue was going to be about. "Blue Floyd"... the early Floyd's interest in blues material, the blues musicians that Syd and Roger and the rest idolized, the legendary origins of the band's name. A handful of blues tunes that the Floyds recorded over the years: "Seamus", "Biding My Time", etc. Maybe even the impromptu nightclub appearances in 1987 and '88 in which the Floyd and their touring band played sets of R&B covers.

The staff, it seems, had other ideas. Some immediately stated that they couldn't get interested in writing for this issue, having very little exposure to or interest in the blues. Some even went so far as to say that they couldn't hear much blues influence in the Floyd's music, and didn't think anything Pink Floyd played even remotely qualified as genuine Blues.

Others chafed at this assertion, and started listing all sorts of examples of Pink Floyd 'blues', ranging from "Atom Heart Mother" to "Marooned", and nearly everything in between. We had quite the heated debate, complete with name-calling and outright character assassination. A few intrepid staffers even waded into an ill-fated attempt to define the blues in some meaningful way.

The result is rather eclectic issue, with some staffers taking the 'strict constructionist' view of the blues (if wasn't recorded by a grizzled black man on some backporch in the Mississippi Delta, or perhaps in Chicago in the 1940s, it might not be qualified to be called Blues) and others taking a decidedly more liberal stance (anything based on the blues scale is the Blues).

I find myself firmly straddling the fence. After all, I consider a lot of what Jimi Hendrix or Cream or Led Zeppelin did to be blues, and the narrow view might exclude proficient blues musicians like Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan. At the same time, you can find the blues scale used extensively in most popular music of the last 50 years--from Aretha Franklin's "Respect" or most classic rock riffs and hooks (Jethro Tull's "Aqualung", for example, or Led Zep's "Black Dog", or just about anything by ACDC), right on up to Madonna and Audioslave. Yet I don't consider any of these examples to really qualify as 'blues'.

The blues is one of the most basic building blocks of modern Western music--the alphabet from which so much musical language is created. Virtually no popular music is free from the influence of the blues, from country to Motown, jazz to heavy metal, and so on. Plenty of rock guitarists play blues-inflected licks not because they have listened to the blues, studied the blues, or loved the blues, but because the music that they did love, study, and listen to was influenced by the blues.

So when David Gilmour plays a bluesy solo in the middle of "Atom Heart Mother", I don't consider that to be "blues" any more than sampling B.B. King makes some young rapper a blues musician. Gilmour's solos are just examples of standard rock and roll guitar.