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There are some pieces of art that just feel powerful. The Mona Lisa innocently hanging in her 30-inch frame in the Louvre, feels powerful. “2001: A Space Odyssey” feels powerful; when minutes of spaceship sequences accompanied by nothing but “The Blue Danube” remain impossibly captivating: That’s power. There’s a variety of musical entries too: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Beethoven’s “Symphony no. 5” both spring to mind. But in the rock world, none achieve this status quite like “Dark Side of the Moon.” The two sides of the album each play like one uninterrupted piece of music; without looking it’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint where one song ends and another begins. And in these two fluid acts, Pink Floyd’s exploration of the human mind and their exploration of musical experimentation come together to form an album that, like other timeless pieces of art, just feels powerful.
“I’ve been mad for fucking years” are the first words to greet a listener of “Dark Side of the Moon,” and that might as well be the album in a nutshell. This blurb and others like it come from Pink Floyd bassist, songwriter, and co-founder Roger Waters’s recording members of the band’s crew answering questions ranging from the innocence of “What’s your favorite food?” to “When was the last time you were violent?” and “Were you in the right?” These answers, sprinkled throughout the album along with the occasional quasi-maniacal laughter, set the scene for an intense introspection into what makes a man mad.
Yet perhaps the album’s greatest strength is the way it forces the listener to play an active role — the album is less of a display of human madness and more of a conversation that encourages the listener to tease the answers out for themselves.
The lyrics “Breathe, breathe in the air / Don’t be afraid to care” are the first sung lyrics that a listener hears on the second track, “Breathe (In the Air),” and they might be the most upbeat ones of the whole album. Whatever lull of peace the opening manages to exude, by the time the carefree drumbeat and bluesy, sliding chords of “Breathe” reach their conclusion, guitarist and singer David Gilmour is already lamenting how the endless cycle of daily work is nothing more than a “race towards an early grave.”
As “Breathe” transitions seamlessly into “On the Run,” the song’s two themes likewise move from trying to stay calm in the face of perpetual toil and clearly failing, to falling into what can only be described as a musical panic attack. In “On The Run,” the rapid, sixteenth note hi-hats underscore the EMS synthesizer, constantly stabbing the listener with the same eight note melody repeated ad infinitum. And yet, despite these two constants, Pink Floyd experiments with vocal clips, machine gun-like noises, and their signature maniacal laughter to build up to a carnage-filled plane crash worthy of a Jimi Hendrix Woodstock performance.
Once the panic attack of “On the Run” subsides, a cacophony of clock ticks and bell chimes drag the listener into arguably the album’s best song, and the only one to credit all four band members as writers, “Time.” Setting the scene with a relentless pairing of metronome and heartbeat followed by slow, powerful chord changes and echoing drums, the song seems to interrogate the listener’s perception of time from the very start.
But in just two couplets, the sudden mood change and Gilmour’s singing immediately feel like a slap in the face, with lyrics that represent the very best of Pink Floyd’s songwriting. “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day / Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way,” epitomizes Waters’ ability to capture and perfectly depict a mundane idea, like wasting away a day. Somehow, that couplet feels exactly like watching a day go by. The second couplet, “The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older / shorter of breath and one day closer to death,” represents Waters’ deeper storytelling, which again forces the listener to figure out for themselves what the song means to them.
“Time” runs through its magnificent guitar solo, a relieving reprise of “Breath,” and finally fades out, and Side One of “Dark Side of the Moon” comes to a close with “The Great Gig in the Sky.” With a title that impeccably captures its energy, session singer Clare Tory unleashes the full extent of her vocal prowess for over three minutes of wordless, pure expression.
“Money,” one of the album’s singles, opens Side Two of the album with an aptly-themed rhythm made from sounds of coins and a cash register. Thematically quite distinct from the rest of the album, “Money” talks about just that, albeit somewhat ironically, as the release of “Dark Side of the Moon” first made the members of Pink Floyd incredibly rich. Interestingly, Waters encourages the rich not to engage in any “goody good bullshit,” which has also aged somewhat poorly considering the recent controversial allegations on the subject of anti-semitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. In any case, the biggest strengths of “Money” are its two solos, on saxophone and guitar, that burst with energy and carry momentum until the beginning of “Us and Them” calms down.
The subsequent longest song on the album and the second single, “Us and Them” serves as an initially mellow and very vague interrogation into the meaninglessness of war. With lines like “God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do” and “the general sat and the lines on the map / moved from side to side,” Waters and fellow cofounder, keyboardist, and songwriter Richard Wright point out the counterintuitive and top-down nature of war in a method reminiscent of the decade prior. The song’s incredibly powerful chorus does the topic justice, but the most unique part is again an interview, where roadie Roger “The Hat” Manifold tells a story about an entanglement: “Well I mean, they're not gonna kill ya, so like, if you give 'em a quick sh ... short, sharp shock, they don't do it again. Dig it? I mean 'e got off light, 'cause I coulda given 'im a thrashin' but I only hit 'im once. It's only the difference between right and wrong innit?” Effortlessly capturing the ideas of the song, moments like these are where the genius of Pink Floyd shine through: On a topic that’s been sung about hundreds of times, only Pink Floyd brings a first-hand experience that makes the listener bring war back to day-to-day life.
The album comes to a close with the instrumental “Any Colour You Like,” followed by the songs “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse,” which morph into one fluid outro. “Brain Damage” serves as a pivotal moment in the album, taking on the question of madness more directly than any other song, with lines like “the lunatic is in my head” being paired with the ever present laughter. But in the midst of these swells of mental instability, “Brain Damage” assures the listener, “And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too / I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.” Somehow, in the deepest throes of mental health issues, “Brain Damage” brings a crumb of comfort: The listener will not be there alone.
The album’s last lyrics, “everything under the sun is in tune / but the sun is eclipsed by the moon” lay the final claim: While darkness and turbulent emotions inevitably await the listener, they await everyone else too. And, as the heartbeat that faded in to open the album fades out to close it, Pink Floyd’s magnum opus reveals why it exudes that sense of sheer power like only select pieces of art. Because, as you listen to it in 2023, 50 years after its release, “Dark Side of the Moon” somehow still manages to leave you feeling like something inside you has changed irreversibly. With every listen, be it your first or twentieth, “Dark Side of the Moon” forces you to come to terms with your own sanity, all the while remaining one of the most legendary rock albums of all time.
