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Harvest | discogs.com |
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The Dark Side of the Moon was ranked eighth in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, and was awarded the Ozymandian Oculus for Best Picture
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It is a well-documented fact that the dark side of the moon is a myth. Though locked in orbit such that only one side ever faces the Earth, the sun casts its cheery glow over the entire lunar surface during the course of a month. The mystery is already solved: it’s an illusion cast by a lack of perspective.
I’m not here to wax lyric about how Dark Side is the greatest album of all time. More than enough people have already done so, in ungracious detail and with unnecessary enthusiasm.
You can’t trust a diehard fan to be honest or impartial.
(Not that there exists such a thing as objective art criticism. Despite my best efforts, Pitchfork continues to issue scores out of ten, and as far as Rolling Stone is concerned the last true music was produced during the Reagan administration.)
Enter me. Someone whose childhood did not revolve around classic rock during a time when it was just called rock, a time when making music on drugs was an out-of-the-box stroke of genius, a time when “Money: / It’s a crime” could qualify as a searing critique of capitalism.
I’m coming at this from the perspective of a shallow privileged ingrate who likes shiny production and sparkly wordplay. I’m a goldfish. Impress me. Hit me where it hurts.
I, a white man, am entitled to everything. That includes opinions on seminal oeuvres in the history of humanity in which I have no emotional investment.
So now that I’ve justified the existence of this article to myself, let me get onto the task of justifying it to you.
Let me tell you a story about discovering new music.
That sticky summer night gave way to a haven of harshly air-conditioned apartment, whose affordability crept darkly through crowning and carpet and taps. There was a Spotify playlist queued up on the speakers, tastefully curated by ourselves, naturally. There was a Tupperware of cold leftover chicken on Ikea's finest table, at which be jabbed with a fistful of mismatched forks. And clutched in my sweaty hand was a godawful cocktail of absinthe and lemonade, the beverage equivalent of that eyewatering stain-hiding clash that adorns bus seats across the globe. It was my hubris that led to the brewing of that vile concoction (how could you go wrong with mint and citrus? By forgetting the difference between mint and anise, it turns out, an oversight itself indebted to Aldi's finest cabernet) and it was my hubris that spurred me through an entire pint of the stuff (for I could not bear to waste a single drop of precious green elixir, horrific adulteration notwithstanding).
Anyway, that was the night I first heard King Krule scrape his way through ‘Baby Blue’, which is a very nice song.
A song that we had covered earlier that evening during the first and only gig of our short-lived but really damn good band, Marmalade Hour. Though crippled with technical difficulties, we were warmly received by an enthusiastic crowd of approximately three dozen friends, whom we delighted with classics by David Bowie, Childish Gambino and Taylor Swift, among others. We were as versatile as we were unprepared.
I remember that night in visceral, lemon-liquorice detail. I relive that night every time I whiff the wrong flavour of dishwashing gel.
But I can’t imagine the excitement of those bemulleted youths tearing away plastic wrap, lifting the vinyl from its rainbow sleeve, blazing it up and dropping the needle. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to curl up next to that record player expecting, well, music, and hearing a different kind of beat throb through the room.
A pulse. A heart.
I can't imagine how this could have blown my mind. I can't fathom how this extraordinary work of art could have illuminated horizons never yet dreamed of.
And yet. You could drive a truck through the unmapped negative space. You can single out each individual element of each track, and count them on one hand. Noodly guitars slap wetly between wafer-thin sheets of percussion that sound like they would crumble with the touch of a finger. It isn't 1973 anymore; production techniques have moved on. Dark Side sounds almost as two-dimensional as the discs it was first played on.
I’m reminded of the Ford Model T, the forebear of the modern car: once a landmark achievement and cornerstone of its industry, now a faintly ridiculous curiosity that gets about two feet to the gallon. It has been so far superseded, so utterly eclipsed by a century of progress that it is barely recognisable as the horseless progenitor of personal everyday transportation.
I don’t mean to suggest that we can’t appreciate the old-fashioned and outdated. It is certainly interesting to look at from a historical perspective. But nobody would dream of driving a Model T today, not least because its crumple zone is your knees. It belongs in a museum.
This is the danger of declaring that the summit has been climbed and the pinnacle reached. If we stop, if we declare the Greatest Album of All Time, we declare that it’s all downhill from here. We undervalue or outright reject the achievements of current and future artists, and we invite smug complacency.
And it is a tempting prospect to look only backwards, to see only what is set in stone. 1997, the commonly-cited Greatest Year of Music saw career-defining releases in Björk’s gleaming Homogenic and Radiohead’s begravelled OK Computer (which gazed into the future respectively with wonder and trepidation) as well as seminal releases from Modest Mouse and the Prodigy, from Daft Punk, from Janet Jackson and Céline Dion and the Spice Girls.
But we cannot close ourselves off from progress. In the past few years we’ve heard A Moon-Shaped Pool, a delicate chronicle of Radiohead’s pearlescent adult fears. We’ve heard Vulnicura, the most explosive divorce album ever wrought by human hands, let alone by Björk’s. And we’ve also heard Janelle Monáe’s vital vision of American freedom in Dirty Computer. We’ve heard Lorde capture and distill the spark of youth in Melodrama. We’ve heard Taylor Swift storm to unimaginable success on a wave of synthesisers and shitty boyfriends. Stopping the clock too soon means completely missing the meteoric rise of a tight-knit cluster of genres, missing Kendrick and Kanye, Nicki and Rihanna, Chance and Childish and Drake and Jay-Z, to say nothing of the radiant Beyoncé, unquestionably the most influential artist of the generation.
So many others have picked up where Pink Floyd left off. Tame Impala have refined a stylish sequel of sorts to their psych-rock, the Flaming Lips turn all dials up to eleven with their squelching overdriven white noise (they have covered both Dark Side and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in their entirety) while King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard play it fast and loose, having made good on their promise to release a whopping five studio albums in 2017. Of course such innovative work now feels derivative. Six years after Dark Side, Sigourney Weaver and co would revolutionise the film industry, as well as the entire genres of horror and science fiction. To a modern audience, the superb Alien is wall-to-wall clichés, and has every right to be — it invented them.
So naturally, Dark Side is best at its most ambiguous. The extraordinary wordless vocalise of ‘The Great Gig In the Sky’ still sends chills down the spine. Is this anonymous presence a witch shrieking as she is burned at the stake, screaming as her skin bubbles and splits, wailing as the flames cook her living sizzling flesh? Perhaps a spirit is performing at the titular gig, and what we mere mortals hear is but a pale echo of a true seraphic version yet to come. Perhaps it’s the rapture of a littler death.
‘Us and Them’, hypnotic and immutable, records the timeless struggle with the Other — it loops and loops and loops again, extending twice as long as necessary and three times as long as polite, until, without a single audible change, it opens into a place of transcendent bliss.
And the solo from ‘Money’ fucking slaps.
Nowadays, Pink Floyd do not enjoy the same popularity as their contemporaries. They are the definition of dad-rock, lacking the thrilling pyrotechnics of Queen, the handsome iconoclasm of the Beatles, the daring fluidity of Bowie or the extraordinary efficiency of ABBA. Pink Floyd lack the protrusions and oddities that future generations, untinted by rosy nostalgia, can grasp. They are not youthful enough, not strange enough, not queer enough — precisely the same reasons they have earned such offputting entitlement and ownership from the ranks of decidedly post-middle-aged mediocrity. Every indie singer-songwriter has had a crack at the melancholic ‘Yesterday’; every a capella group incorrectly thinks it can pull off the mighty ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’; every television drama wants to end its season with a wistful ‘Life On Mars’; every club is contractually obligated to play the immortal ‘Dancing Queen’ at least once every hour. One can’t imagine substituting, say, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ into any of these scenarios. It’s not that Pink Floyd are unjoyful exactly, but they are certainly headier, more cerebral, more serious, and without question less fun.
It may seem to the diehard Floydhead like I’ve completely failed to grasp the brilliance of Dark Side, that I’ve talked around it and have yet to engage with the actual content. And let me tell you I share that opinion. It’s certainly good if you ask me, maybe even great, but I just can’t bridge the gap to the era-defining history-making work of genius lauded by the entire music industry.
I can’t wrap my head around it, precisely because I can wrap my head around it.
To my modern millennial ears, Dark Side is too digestible for an alleged masterpiece, partitioned between polite jamming and straightforward collage. It’s in and out in a courteous forty-three minutes. No aspect of it scans as particularly artsy, especially compared to highlights from more recent history: Joanna Newsom’s knots within knots of baroque poetry set for spiderwebbed harp and luscious orchestra, for example, or perhaps the jarring, stuttering, scorching incomprehensibility of the latest from Car Seat Headrest. It tickles me that Pink Floyd’s concept of impressionism is so literal, representing fear and exhaustion and the passage of time as echoing footsteps, ragged breathing and analogue clockworks. How very British.
And yet, a spectrum lies hidden inside the most ordinary of light. All it takes is the right prism to conjure forth hidden colours. Where else might secret oranges and mysterious indigos lurk? No need to worry — our best and brightest are on it.
Onwards, always.
The work continues.
(Not that there exists such a thing as objective art criticism. Despite my best efforts, Pitchfork continues to issue scores out of ten, and as far as Rolling Stone is concerned the last true music was produced during the Reagan administration.)
Enter me. Someone whose childhood did not revolve around classic rock during a time when it was just called rock, a time when making music on drugs was an out-of-the-box stroke of genius, a time when “Money: / It’s a crime” could qualify as a searing critique of capitalism.
I’m coming at this from the perspective of a shallow privileged ingrate who likes shiny production and sparkly wordplay. I’m a goldfish. Impress me. Hit me where it hurts.
I, a white man, am entitled to everything. That includes opinions on seminal oeuvres in the history of humanity in which I have no emotional investment.
So now that I’ve justified the existence of this article to myself, let me get onto the task of justifying it to you.
Let me tell you a story about discovering new music.
That sticky summer night gave way to a haven of harshly air-conditioned apartment, whose affordability crept darkly through crowning and carpet and taps. There was a Spotify playlist queued up on the speakers, tastefully curated by ourselves, naturally. There was a Tupperware of cold leftover chicken on Ikea's finest table, at which be jabbed with a fistful of mismatched forks. And clutched in my sweaty hand was a godawful cocktail of absinthe and lemonade, the beverage equivalent of that eyewatering stain-hiding clash that adorns bus seats across the globe. It was my hubris that led to the brewing of that vile concoction (how could you go wrong with mint and citrus? By forgetting the difference between mint and anise, it turns out, an oversight itself indebted to Aldi's finest cabernet) and it was my hubris that spurred me through an entire pint of the stuff (for I could not bear to waste a single drop of precious green elixir, horrific adulteration notwithstanding).
Anyway, that was the night I first heard King Krule scrape his way through ‘Baby Blue’, which is a very nice song.
A song that we had covered earlier that evening during the first and only gig of our short-lived but really damn good band, Marmalade Hour. Though crippled with technical difficulties, we were warmly received by an enthusiastic crowd of approximately three dozen friends, whom we delighted with classics by David Bowie, Childish Gambino and Taylor Swift, among others. We were as versatile as we were unprepared.
I remember that night in visceral, lemon-liquorice detail. I relive that night every time I whiff the wrong flavour of dishwashing gel.
But I can’t imagine the excitement of those bemulleted youths tearing away plastic wrap, lifting the vinyl from its rainbow sleeve, blazing it up and dropping the needle. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to curl up next to that record player expecting, well, music, and hearing a different kind of beat throb through the room.
A pulse. A heart.
I can't imagine how this could have blown my mind. I can't fathom how this extraordinary work of art could have illuminated horizons never yet dreamed of.
And yet. You could drive a truck through the unmapped negative space. You can single out each individual element of each track, and count them on one hand. Noodly guitars slap wetly between wafer-thin sheets of percussion that sound like they would crumble with the touch of a finger. It isn't 1973 anymore; production techniques have moved on. Dark Side sounds almost as two-dimensional as the discs it was first played on.
I’m reminded of the Ford Model T, the forebear of the modern car: once a landmark achievement and cornerstone of its industry, now a faintly ridiculous curiosity that gets about two feet to the gallon. It has been so far superseded, so utterly eclipsed by a century of progress that it is barely recognisable as the horseless progenitor of personal everyday transportation.
I don’t mean to suggest that we can’t appreciate the old-fashioned and outdated. It is certainly interesting to look at from a historical perspective. But nobody would dream of driving a Model T today, not least because its crumple zone is your knees. It belongs in a museum.
This is the danger of declaring that the summit has been climbed and the pinnacle reached. If we stop, if we declare the Greatest Album of All Time, we declare that it’s all downhill from here. We undervalue or outright reject the achievements of current and future artists, and we invite smug complacency.
And it is a tempting prospect to look only backwards, to see only what is set in stone. 1997, the commonly-cited Greatest Year of Music saw career-defining releases in Björk’s gleaming Homogenic and Radiohead’s begravelled OK Computer (which gazed into the future respectively with wonder and trepidation) as well as seminal releases from Modest Mouse and the Prodigy, from Daft Punk, from Janet Jackson and Céline Dion and the Spice Girls.
But we cannot close ourselves off from progress. In the past few years we’ve heard A Moon-Shaped Pool, a delicate chronicle of Radiohead’s pearlescent adult fears. We’ve heard Vulnicura, the most explosive divorce album ever wrought by human hands, let alone by Björk’s. And we’ve also heard Janelle Monáe’s vital vision of American freedom in Dirty Computer. We’ve heard Lorde capture and distill the spark of youth in Melodrama. We’ve heard Taylor Swift storm to unimaginable success on a wave of synthesisers and shitty boyfriends. Stopping the clock too soon means completely missing the meteoric rise of a tight-knit cluster of genres, missing Kendrick and Kanye, Nicki and Rihanna, Chance and Childish and Drake and Jay-Z, to say nothing of the radiant Beyoncé, unquestionably the most influential artist of the generation.
So many others have picked up where Pink Floyd left off. Tame Impala have refined a stylish sequel of sorts to their psych-rock, the Flaming Lips turn all dials up to eleven with their squelching overdriven white noise (they have covered both Dark Side and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in their entirety) while King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard play it fast and loose, having made good on their promise to release a whopping five studio albums in 2017. Of course such innovative work now feels derivative. Six years after Dark Side, Sigourney Weaver and co would revolutionise the film industry, as well as the entire genres of horror and science fiction. To a modern audience, the superb Alien is wall-to-wall clichés, and has every right to be — it invented them.
So naturally, Dark Side is best at its most ambiguous. The extraordinary wordless vocalise of ‘The Great Gig In the Sky’ still sends chills down the spine. Is this anonymous presence a witch shrieking as she is burned at the stake, screaming as her skin bubbles and splits, wailing as the flames cook her living sizzling flesh? Perhaps a spirit is performing at the titular gig, and what we mere mortals hear is but a pale echo of a true seraphic version yet to come. Perhaps it’s the rapture of a littler death.
‘Us and Them’, hypnotic and immutable, records the timeless struggle with the Other — it loops and loops and loops again, extending twice as long as necessary and three times as long as polite, until, without a single audible change, it opens into a place of transcendent bliss.
And the solo from ‘Money’ fucking slaps.
Nowadays, Pink Floyd do not enjoy the same popularity as their contemporaries. They are the definition of dad-rock, lacking the thrilling pyrotechnics of Queen, the handsome iconoclasm of the Beatles, the daring fluidity of Bowie or the extraordinary efficiency of ABBA. Pink Floyd lack the protrusions and oddities that future generations, untinted by rosy nostalgia, can grasp. They are not youthful enough, not strange enough, not queer enough — precisely the same reasons they have earned such offputting entitlement and ownership from the ranks of decidedly post-middle-aged mediocrity. Every indie singer-songwriter has had a crack at the melancholic ‘Yesterday’; every a capella group incorrectly thinks it can pull off the mighty ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’; every television drama wants to end its season with a wistful ‘Life On Mars’; every club is contractually obligated to play the immortal ‘Dancing Queen’ at least once every hour. One can’t imagine substituting, say, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ into any of these scenarios. It’s not that Pink Floyd are unjoyful exactly, but they are certainly headier, more cerebral, more serious, and without question less fun.
It may seem to the diehard Floydhead like I’ve completely failed to grasp the brilliance of Dark Side, that I’ve talked around it and have yet to engage with the actual content. And let me tell you I share that opinion. It’s certainly good if you ask me, maybe even great, but I just can’t bridge the gap to the era-defining history-making work of genius lauded by the entire music industry.
I can’t wrap my head around it, precisely because I can wrap my head around it.
To my modern millennial ears, Dark Side is too digestible for an alleged masterpiece, partitioned between polite jamming and straightforward collage. It’s in and out in a courteous forty-three minutes. No aspect of it scans as particularly artsy, especially compared to highlights from more recent history: Joanna Newsom’s knots within knots of baroque poetry set for spiderwebbed harp and luscious orchestra, for example, or perhaps the jarring, stuttering, scorching incomprehensibility of the latest from Car Seat Headrest. It tickles me that Pink Floyd’s concept of impressionism is so literal, representing fear and exhaustion and the passage of time as echoing footsteps, ragged breathing and analogue clockworks. How very British.
And yet, a spectrum lies hidden inside the most ordinary of light. All it takes is the right prism to conjure forth hidden colours. Where else might secret oranges and mysterious indigos lurk? No need to worry — our best and brightest are on it.
Onwards, always.
The work continues.