55. Pink Floyd, "The Dark Side of the Moon"

 

One thing I've learned doing this project is that some albums I thought were revelatory masterpieces in early high school now sound dated and boring, and this is one of them.  Man, I was so into this album, because I was 15 and had just started smoking weed and this album is the perfect vehicle for a 15-year-old beginning stoner.  I would go over to my friend James' house and we would put this on and get to the very quiet end of "On the Run" and then the cacophony of loud, blaring alarm clocks at the beginning of "Time" and it sounded like the world ending and man that was such a trip.

Now it sounds like extremely - extremely - well-produced prog-jazz-rock, but is it ever cold.  The only real warmth on this record is Clare Torry's wailing, impassioned vocal on "The Great Gig in the Sky," for which she was paid 30 pounds (she later settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and got a co-writing credit).  After the wordless opener, "Speak to Me," which serves as a kind of overture, the first song is "Breathe," sung by guitarist David Gilmour, although he doesn't start singing until about 1:20 in.  After another instrumental, the synth-bubbly "On the Run," we have "Time," a meditation on how YOU WILL NEVER ACHIEVE YOUR DREAMS because you're stuck in a rut, basically:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Then there's the last verse which slyly mocks religion and of course was intoxicating to a 15-year-old with the kind of light rebellion you can only have as a privileged suburban kid:

Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells

Ha!  I see through your gimmickry, Big Church!  And my pals in Pink Floyd do too!

None of the songs are really suitable to be singles, but "Money" was the single and it got played to death and probably still is.  It does for capitalism what "Time" did for religion:

Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise, it's no surprise
That they're giving none away

The irony here, of course, is that this album made the members of Pink Floyd fabulously wealthy.  They all promptly bought country estates and/or started collecting vintage automobiles or whatnot.  This album sold so well that it was still on the Billboard album charts well into 1988 (it was released in 1973), setting a record with 736 consecutive weeks on the chart.  It's been estimated that one out of 14 people in the US under the age of 65 owned the album at some point, including me.

"Brain Damage" is obviously about former bandmember Syd Barrett, a continuing concern for the band, who wrote about him again and again.  This is the song that contains the album title ("And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes/I'll see you on the dark side of the moon") and has a nice crescendo effect that sounds especially good after a few hits of Z-grade weed purchased behind a gas station, or so I've been told.

Look, I'm not saying this is a bad album; it's certainly not a bad album.  It's just not what I thought it was as a youth, which is some kind of magic key that unlocks the real story of how the world works.  A lot of the groundbreaking ideas - religion is a scam, everyone's scrabbling for money - seem pretty basic and intuitive now.  Still, you don't get to be one of the best-selling albums in the history of recorded music if you're not doing something right.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? 15-year-old me is gonna be so pissed, but on today's list, it's a no.