TheLunatic

This is my first post, so excuse me if I have accidentally placed this thread in the wrong section of the forum. It may be moved wherever is appropriate.

I wanted to discuss my interpretation of this phenomenal album and hear other peoples' ideas on the subject. Many friends of mine have very obscure, unique interpretations and the album is so abstract that it is hard to tell whether or not there can ever really be a sole analysis of truth. The Dark Side of the Moon can be anything you want it to be, and personally it has taught me a lot of things.

Before you get the wrong idea, no I was not on drugs when I came up with this. But you know, I could see why you might think so after you read what I'm about to tell you.

The album is played out like a story and the songs flow directly into each other. If you have never listened to the entire album chronologically, I strongly recommend it. I'm going to assume most of you have some knowledge of what the album sounds like so I don't need to describe the songs in depth before analyzing them. Keep in mind that these are all my opinions and I am in no way stating that my ideas are an objective truth about the album.

The first song is Speak to Me / Breathe. This song describes the running of rabbits and choosing to believe not what you are told but what you can feel. It makes me feel completely at home and naive in a way that I have not discovered enough about myself.

That's when On The Run starts. The song is obviously supposed to emulate the noises of travel, more specifically airports and plane crashes, but I feel like the metaphor extends past the physical and the "travel" aspect is a voyage through reality. As reality falls away and we crash, the universe begins to expose itself in layers and unravel as we begin to learn what it really is to "look around" and "choose your own ground."

Time is the first of four human flaws that is presented to us. This section of reality is here to bring closure to the fact that we depend on this abstract idea of time so much when really it doesn't exist and only binds us to our fears of dying and worries of losing track of our youth. Time is, in my opinion, the best song on the album because of its wise nature as it reveals the difficulties associated with measuring life in segments. After listening to this song, it is as if we become more selfless when we choose not to depend on time itself.

The Great Gig in the Sky is, by my interpretation, about pleasure. I read somewhere that the vocals are supposed to sound like an orgasm, which definitely seems accurate. Although the song is incredibly beautiful, pleasure is one of the human flaws that is required to remove before we can achieve selflessness. Think of it like this is our final glimpse at the beauty of pleasure before moving on to the more troubling flaws.

Then comes Money. It describes plainly and accurately why any system revolving around money is a mindless, greedy game used to gain power. "Money, So they say, Is the root of all evil today." At this point in the album it seems as though the stakes are getting higher and the flaws are being presented as more and more dangerous. Plain and simple, we are being told that one cannot possibly be selfless and depend on money at the same time, because all money can be is one's ego represented through material and power. It's almost as if the album is saying, "You do not need this." Appropriately, the consequence of money leads to the theme of the next song.

Us and Them is about war, and more specifically, the psychology of war. Us and Them seems to me as the most complex song on the album, because it isn't simply preaching the evils of war; it is presenting them in a desperately sad, depressing and pathetic aspect of human nature. This journey toward selflessness that I have been describing ends here as we understand that, if anything, we cannot participate in war or any of the evils associated with war. This becomes the final step in cleansing the human mind of all of its faults, and suddenly we become omniscient.

Any Colour You Like is shown to be extremely powerful and and represents the success of becoming selfless and the loss of the ego. There isn't much to say really, because I can't say I've ever lost my ego or if that's even possible in terms of human life. All this song does is represent that thought, and the feeling that you can do anything. Then, just as the mind begins to rationalize that you can't do anything, and that you can't lose your ego as I just explained, Brain Damage hits.

Brain Damage seems obviously inspired by Syd Barrett's decline into insanity and the song questions who is really insane and how one who is sane can truly know that they aren't a lunatic. There is a lot of suppression going on, talk of staying off the grass and keeping the loonies on the path. To drop down from total loss of ego to insanity is a big gap but the transition is sensible. We live insane lives, comprised of lust, greed, wars...we let the ticking clocks of time dictate when things happen in our lives and we live for the pleasures that appear from time to time.

Eclipse is the acceptance of our human flaws. It is a compromise that we can try to remove the self but never really succeed, and that losing the ego isn't necessarily a good thing in the world we live in exclusively. The sun is this idea of selflessness, while the moon blocks out the sun as the human flaws. The eclipse allows a glimmer of light to emerge around our flaws so we can come to terms with what lies beyond our selfish lives.



And that's my interpretation.