This Is Pink Floyd's Only Song To Top The Billboard Hot 100
Pink Floyd was a band that captivated fans for decades. While they did weather a nasty split with Roger Waters in the 1980s and reformed with David Gilmour as their lead, they disbanded for good when Richard Wright died, per Britannica. Waters still tours, playing Pink Floyd songs, since he wrote them. Despite their now being a part of past rock history, their music still resonates today.
One thing that made them stand out among other bands was that they preferred to craft songs that were meant to create an entire theme around an album. "The Wall" was about disillusionment and alienation, for one. They didn't write a song that was only intended for radio play. They didn't go chasing that one hit. It certainly didn't hurt their appeal — they sold out entire stadiums when they went on tour.
That mindset is why, despite all their collective brilliance, only one song raced all the way up the Billboard Hot 100 songs and stayed at the top. Surprisingly, it wasn't "Comfortably Numb" or "Run Like Hell." It was a song from the same album and it made teachers mad.
Roger Waters drew upon personal experience for this hit
The song that peaked at the top of the American charts on the Billboard Hot 100, per Stereogum, was "Another Brick in the Wall Part II," whose video (which was actually part of the movie "The Wall") featured British schoolkids being fed into a meat grinder. Very sobering imagery. It was a denouncing of the British school system. The song, which seamlessly segued in from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives," a song about the cruelty of teachers, had a disco funk of sort. Fans of the band loved the lyrics, especially the "We don't need no education" part. This part of the song surely vexed teachers over the years.
Roger Waters wrote the song, via Society of Rock, by drawing on his own experience growing up and his encounters with British schoolteachers. Surely none of them were as cartoonishly evil as the headmaster in "The Wall," who barked, "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" Waters did say in an interview that while he supported education, he found the experience in the 1950's to be rigid and controlling, which begged for people to rebel.
"Another Brick in the Wall Part II" stayed at that position for four weeks. The song remains popular to this day, and Waters is so protective of the anti-authority message of the lyrics that he forbade Facebook from using it in an ad, per Rolling Store. We certainly don't need no thought control, either.