Dark Side of the Moon

Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is a masterpiece for the ears. It is full of sonic booms and bangs that travel from speaker to speaker like a crazy train. The album is for music listeners who appreciate the avant-garde, minimalism and ambience. Guitars, synthesizers, drums, bass and the most hi-tech equipment of the day were used to construct this rock music milestone.

In 1972, Roger Waters, the bassist for the group, was feeling life was going by too fast for him and he wanted to slow down and analyze it. So he broke it down into key themes for this new album: First, there is the human lifetime which is the umbrella for the album. Appropriately, a heartbeat starts off the opening track "Speak to Me/Breathe", created by the bass drums of Nick Mason, the drummer and percussionist. The track segues into "On the Run" which incorporates many of the sounds the listener hears throughout the album: Footsteps, clocks, airplanes landing and so forth which grabs the audience by their ears. The song shows the maniac pace that life takes us on, and how humans are always on the run, traveling from place to place. Life goes by and according to Waters people are preconditioned by our parents and society to think that life starts when our higher education is finished and when we are out on our own. This is not the case, life begins as soon as we are born, and that is the theme of the song "Time": `You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today./And then one day you find ten years have got behind you./No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.'. Waters shows that time waits for no one and if you don't live life to the fullest, it will just waste away.

"Great Gig in the Sky" includes an instrumental piece with guitarist David Gilmour on the lap pedal, keyboardist Richard Wright's piano work and an improvisational vocal by session vocalist Clare Torry. Torry scats throughout the song. Scat singing is a jazz term, meaning that the vocalist just improvises over music with humming and what not. The song can be interpreted as a song about death, even though there are many interpretations. The vocal highs and lows match the musical flow in the background, showing the successes and depressions we all go through in life; Torry's voice speeds up, her volume increases, and then she slows down after the climax.

"Money" is a song about the good and bad sides to our dead presidents. You can get everything you want if you can afford it, but what happens when greed claims us and we want a share of what someone else has? Money makes the world go `round, it fulfills our dreams and desires usually, but the question is whether it makes us truly happy or not. Material possessions can only last so long, and the evil thing about money is that it always drives us to get more. Listeners should think that Waters wants us to remember what is really important with one of the last lines in the song: `Money is the root of all evil today'.

Next song: "Us and Them". This song, like "Great Gig", can be translated many different ways. The feeling of Us and Them is universal for humans: teenagers and their parents, natives and immigrants, countries at war, the rich and the poor, outcasts and insiders, weirdoes and the "normal" people; you can fill in the blanks. "Any Colour You Like" is full of wah-wah guitar, "Brain Damage" is a song about insanity and "Eclipse" wraps up the album saying that whatever we do is pointless because life ends: `All that's to come/and everything under the sun is in tune/but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.'. Therefore, the end of life coincides with this line which concludes Waters' album-length theme of the human lifetime.

Throughout the album, voices can be heard by numerous people that the band interviewed with random questions. There are answers to questions involving violence, brutality and death. The subliminal voices in the background featured give a whole new type of element different from other albums I have heard, and I think it makes DSOTM richer and more alive.

DSOTM is a personal favorite of mine that I can listen to over and over again. However, I do not consider it to be Pink Floyd's best; that title belongs to Animals from 1977. Animals is a biting satire created by Waters on human society, broken up into the categories of dogs, pigs and sheep, as an allusion to George Orwell's Animal Farm. Animals is raw and dirtier, something I feel DSOTM lacks. DSOTM is one of those rare and flawless albums, but sometimes it's that flaw that can also make an album great, and that album is Animals. Why did I talk about Dark Side and not Animals? Well for those music lovers new to Pink Floyd, I recommend you start with Dark Side and then branch out to the Floyd's albums before and after.

And to my fellow Pink Floyd fans, matching Dark Side of the Moon against The Wizard of Oz does not work; I have tried it. There is a rumor on the internet that if you turn off the volume on the movie and start the album at the beginning of the movie (there are debates as to when to exactly start the music), the music will coincide almost perfectly with the movie.

Now sit back with your headphones and speakers, (I highly recommend listening to Dark Side in the dark) relax, and zone out.

Dedicated in memory of Richard Wright, keyboardist, songwriter and original founding member of Pink Floyd.