Pigs (Three Different Ones)

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"Pigs (Three Different Ones)"

Song by Pink Floyd
from the album Animals
Released	January 23, 1977 (UK) February 2, 1977 (US)
Recorded	April-May 1976
Genre	Progressive rock
Length	11:28
Label	Harvest / Capitol
Writer(s)	Roger Waters
Producer(s)	Pink Floyd
Animals track listing
"Pigs on the Wing 1" "Dogs" "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" "Sheep" "Pigs on the Wing 2"

"Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is a song from Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals. In the album's three parts, "Dogs," "Pigs," and "Sheep," pigs represent the people whom Roger Waters considers to be at the top of the social ladder, the ones with wealth and power; they also manipulate the rest of society and encourage them to be viciously competitive and cutthroat, so the pigs can remain powerful. Waters suggests that the pigs manipulate the dogs in the lines "Gotta admit, that I'm a little bit confused/Sometimes it seems to me, as if I'm just being used" in the song "Dogs."

1 Summary
2 Live versions
3 Personnel
4 References

[edit] Summary

The first verse refers to no one in particular, but rather businessmen in general. The second verse indirectly refers to the opposition leader at that time, Margaret Thatcher, although her name or title is never mentioned. The lyrics' offensiveness to Thatcher is subtle, stating that she is "good fun with a hand gun;" better-defined obscenities are prevalent when it refers to her as a "bus-stop rat bag" and "fucked-up old hag".

The third mentions Mary Whitehouse by name, painting her as a prudish, sexually repressed "house-proud town mouse." This contributed to Whitehouse's negative image of Pink Floyd, who she thought were immorally promoting sex and drugs. Some people (and US politicians like Tipper Gore) misconstrued this verse as "Hey You White House" as in taking a shot at the US political climate and accused Pink Floyd of being anti-American which was confirmed on the 1992 Pink Floyd US radio documentary Pink Floyd The 25th Anniversary Special.

Apparently during this part of the song, some of the original words were, in fact, censored by the band or its management before the final mix was recorded for release. Consequently we do not hear the actual words that the group used to describe Mary Whitehouse in detail - just a few "grunting sounds" and the words previously mentioned.

Halfway through the song, Gilmour uses a Heil talk box on the guitar solo and Waters uses a vocoder to mimic the sound of pigs. This is the first use of a talkbox by Pink Floyd. ^[1]

In some cassette tape versions of the album in the US, this song was divided into two parts after the first verse, in order to minimize the total length of tape.

[edit] Live versions

The live version of "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is hailed as one of the best songs they performed live.^{[citation needed]} The normal length of the song performed live is roughly 17 minutes (some would top out at 20 minutes), compared with the album length of 11 minutes and 28 seconds. The live versions features two guitar solos, a synthesizer solo (which replaced the voice box solo) and a final keyboard solo.

When played the 1977 tour, Roger Waters shouted a different number for each concert. This purportedly has the purpose of identifying bootleg recordings. ^[2]

In 1987, Waters performed a shortened version of the song, featuring only the first two verses and shorter guitar solos between them as part of an extended Pink Floyd medley.