Heavy times, heavy music
• The vast success of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ was proof that pop music could engage with philosophy
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was released on March 1 1973. The early 1970s, during which the album was put together, was a time of great social and political upheaval. In England the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was active and the notorious Bloody Sunday occurred, the Vietnam War was raging, Bangladesh was fighting for independence from Pakistan, the Watergate scandal began unfolding while Idi Amin expelled thousands of Asians from Uganda.
It was a period described by contemporary historians as the beginning of the decline of liberal democracy; a time of crisis for the West, of unhappy workers, rebellious students, radical terrorists, economic recession and social crises. Historian Simon Reid-Henry describes it as an unravelling of the postwar consensus, one in which socioeconomic crises drove citizens to “suddenly demand of their governments what their governments could not provide”.
Culturally, social mores were being questioned and rejected, the postwar routine was experienced as stifling, and the 1960’s passion for liberation had given way to despair and pessimism.
This was the world rendered by Dark Side, one of alienation, desperation, fragmentation and madness. The lyrics were held together by a disillusionment with the world the band saw around them.
Considered by many as their crowning achievement, Dark Side is a great album. It is a complete work that was singular, inspired by a unified vision and the product of a great band at their peak, working together to create a masterpiece. Pink Floyd never reached that height again, even if later albums achieved enormous popularity and sales.
Pink Floyd was one of the bands regarded as “heavy” ,a word that at the time referred to music outside the mainstream, allied to the notion of “underground music”. The genre arose as a reaction to the commercialisation that shaped “pop” music, a new phenomenon that emerged at the confluence of postwar leisure and an emergent youth culture, a new industry that would generate vast amounts of money, locked into a symbiotic relation with the fashion industry. All these were targets for the “heavies”, who shunned the manner in which youth culture was used to constitute and manipulate a generation. It was also the first time that the notion of “generation” became a popular factor of differentiation.
EXPERIMENTED
Even before Dark Side, the band had experimented with new forms, breaking out of the traditional song format, following in the footsteps of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Pink Floyd’s first album, mostly written by founding member Syd Barrett in 1967, is regarded as a psychedelic excursion. Barrett’s exit made way for a more experimental approach and later albums featured pieces with extended improvisation and sonic exploration. He was replaced by guitarist David Gilmour, joining Roger Waters on bass, Richard Wright on keyboards and Nick Mason on percussion. All of them sang as well as dabbled with various sources of sound.
Later, they turned to synthesisers, electronic modifiers, echo machines, and use of the studio to create new textures, timbres and sonic landscapes. The album’s use of non-musical sounds, musique concrète, collage, the sounds of helicopters, car crashes, clocks and cash registers all made for a stunning unity, held together by a sensuous and lush musicality.
Dark Side’s opening, titled Speak to Me, begins with a simulated heartbeat, immediately hinting at the themes of mortality, time and finitude. A collage, it is awash with spoken phrases, the most glaring declaring: “I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like most of us are.” It is followed by the sound of a helicopter, which is almost always the sound of a crisis. The track uses the stereo spectrum in a spectacular manner, as does the entire album, which won plaudits for production. It ends with a fierce musical lament, the cry of a woman (Clare Torry), before it segues into Breathe (in the Air).
It is a startling opening to the album, promising a strange and mysterious journey.
The first piece of music proper, the first song, Breathe, features a simple, plaintive bassline with electric piano, guitar and slide guitar setting a “heavy” mood. “Breathe, breathe in the air,” it intones. “Don’t be afraid to care/ Leave but don’t leave me/ Look around and choose your own ground /For long you live and high you fly / And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry … And all you touch and all you see/ Is all your life will ever be. / You race towards an early grave.”
The album’s lyrics lack the literary weight of a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen piece, but they attempt to bring serious, philosophical issues to the fore, saturated as they are by a deep despair about the tragic quality of life itself.
On the Run is a piece of electronic rock, a genre developed by various groups at that time: Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Neu, Can. It features a Moog VCS3 synthesiser churning out a repetitive, bubbling riff, with choppers and car chases overlaid onto the music, making for a paranoiac atmosphere. The sound of running suggests a chase, with the runner gasping for air.
This was the Floyd doing their thing, the thing they had been doing from their earliest days, pushing the boundaries of what counted as music.
Time begins with the sounds of timepieces: clocks ticking, bells ringing, before ominous single notes struck on guitar and keyboards set a heavy mood, with a beautiful interplay between tuned drums and electric piano.
It reflects on the meaning of the everyday, the sense of life lived without meaning or purpose, on mortality and ennui.
“Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines…”
Gilmore plays a beautiful guitar solo halfway through the track, and his stamp on the album is unmistakable.
The Great Gig in the Sky is lyrical, and features a heartrending vocal solo by Torry. It is a cry of anguish that has few musical equivalents.
It is followed by Money ,a consideration of real money, the stuff of billionaires, who can buy football teams and Lear jets —a phenomenon that was only just beginning in the early 1970s but has become an all too real feature of our age.
‘AND ALL YOU TOUCH AND ALL YOU SEE/ IS ALL YOUR LIFE WILL EVER BE. / YOU RACE TOWARDS AN EARLY GRAVE’
THE LYRICS WERE HELD TOGETHER BY A DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE WORLD THE BAND SAW AROUND THEM
COLLAGE
Money begins with a collage of cash registers, rhythmically arranged to musical effect. One of the two singles from the album, it is funky, with vocals sung by Gilmore that play with a singsong intonation reminiscent of nursery rhymes. But the content is scathing, decrying the centrality of the filthy lucre in our lives and in the systems we are imbricated in. An anticapitalist harangue, it nevertheless acknowledges the necessity of the thing while lamenting excessive class divides.
Musically, a single note on the guitar put through a tremolo effect gives the piece a distinctive sonic quality. The piece features thrilling solos by both Gilmore and Dick Parry on tenor sax.
Us and Them is at the core of the philosophy of the album, questioning the inevitability of tribal allegiances, seemingly so necessary to identity, to humanity, yet the source of all antagonisms — and of war. It castigates warmongers who send soldiers to their deaths:
“And the general sat/ and the lines on the map/ moved from side to side.”
The song declares that social divisions are often manipulated into being and deployed by malevolent forces, especially those who reap material reward from the poverty of others — think Dick Cheney and Halliburton.
The longest track on the album, it highlights a Parry sax solo that gives the piece a timbre all its own.
Any Colour You Like seamlessly follows, as if just another verse of the same song. Waters suggested that the songs be linked into a continuous piece of music, instead of the discrete tracks of the traditional LPs. The band liked the idea.
Any Colour is an instrumental masterpiece, in my reckoning as great as the opening track of an earlier album, Obscured By Clouds.
Both Wright and Gilmore are intensely harmonious, the keyboardist turning repetition into a virtue with phrases that are simple, profound and poignant. Gilmore was at the height of his inventiveness, his overdubbed call-and-response guitar licks are products of an incredible sensitivity. It is the Floyd at its most sublime.
Brain Damage reflects on the use of psychiatry and neurosurgery to control recalcitrant individuals. Waters rails against a situation in which rebellion is classed as pathology, and medicalised so that the lobotomy, or its modern equivalent, awaits those who refuse to submit to social conformity. “Got to keep the loonies on the path,” sings a Waters seemingly influenced by French philosopher Michel Foucault and anti psychiatrist RD Laing.
Manic laughter is followed by the nightmarish line:
“There’s someone in my head but it’s not me… And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
The theme of madness has its roots in the fate of Barrett, who looms over the band’s entire career. His departure came after he lapsed into a kind of catatonic state. Waters once tried to get Barrett to see Laing, but the singer refused to get out of the car.
Eclipse closes the album with a statement of deep disillusion.
The album is an exploration of human existential reality. Its vast success — tens of million copies were sold — was proof that millions do indeed reflect on life, its meaning, its tragedy, giving the lie to the notion that such portentous, philosophical themes are not the stuff of music fans and their quotidian realities.
Ultimately, it is suggested that the dark side of the moon, the realm of lunacy, is Earth.
Dark Side was brilliant in its conception, reportedly inspired by Waters, who wrote all the lyrics. He said that the question he asked on Dark Side was, “Can human beings identify and sympathise with each other, instead of antagonising, mistrusting, or exploiting each other?”
Waters later talked of pressures that are “anti-life”, and the album’s use of the moon as a symbol reflects his obsession with darkness and the lack of light and clarity. Gilmore said in an interview before beginning work on the album, Waters “came up with the specific idea of dealing with all the things that drive people mad”.
George A Reisch, writing in Pink Floyd and Philosophy, said: “With Dark Side, Waters’ head for metaphysics and his growing talent as a songwriter combined to create an album that indicts Being itself:
‘Everything under the sun is in tune’. Dark Side concludes, ‘But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.’
“Life does not just happen to be difficult, sad, and tragic for so many. Because it is controlled by these underlying metaphysical structures, it is essentially and therefore permanently tragic.”
END OF PROG ROCK
It was perhaps the quintessential example of the prog rock scene — progressive rock music that aspired to become art rather than pop at a time when the barrier between high and popular culture was insurmountable and oppressive. Yet it differed from prog rock in that it did not try to create complex movements as in the works of classical composers, it was more rock but rendered in an ultrarefined manner.
Punk rock emerged a few years after Dark Side, around 1975/76, partly motivated by a reaction to prog rock, with the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “I hate Pink Floyd”.
But the album was also the beginning of the end for the band, which began to split into factions as its members struggled against each other. More and more, it became the band of Waters, with Gilmore, Wright and Mason chafing against his dominance.
The former friends began to clash and the band slowly disintegrated, with Waters attempting to “struggle to modify what had been an ostensibly democratic band into the reality of one with a single leader”, according to Mason.
With Dark Side, the band had hit their peak, and the only way was down. After its success the band members became immensely wealthy, and their next album, Wish You Were Here, addressed the pressures of rock stardom and the corruptions of the music industry.
Animals followed, with the band’s clashes now over money as well as leadership intensifying. They had great success with The Wall, but at the cost of toxic discord among themselves. With The Wall, they ejected Wright, and by the Final Cut, Gilmore was axed from the credits; he had not contributed any material. He went on to record his second solo album, and each of the others engaged in various solo projects.
By 1987 the other three were continuing as Pink Floyd while Waters went solo. They collaborated on various projects after that, but never as the full post-Barrett Pink Floyd.
Barrett died in 2006, Wright in 2008 and Waters went on to become a scathing critic of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
Pink Floyd finally sank into their dark side…
THE ALBUM’S USE OF THE MOON AS A SYMBOL REFLECTS HIS OBSESSION WITH DARKNESS AND THE LACK OF LIGHT AND CLARITY