Through the Dark Side of the Moon
Quote:
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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
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- T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
Speak To Me
It all begins with the beating of a heart, the purest and simplest sign of life. From the time we are a curled up little fetus inside our mother’s womb, to the fateful time when our lives fade and we pass into the great unknown, the beating of our heart is the one constant. It’s the ticking clock in our lives, and every beat is a grain of sand slipping through our fingers. Then another sound enters the picture, the clicks and ticks of machinery. Already, within the first forty seconds of the album, the central theme is subtly introduced; man versus the modern world he created, and each new soul’s struggle to make their way through it. With a piercing scream and manic laughter, the journey begins.
Breathe
Hypnotic guitar chords. Cryptic lyrics. What does this song mean? Here's what I got:
Open your eyes. Look at the world around you. Find your place in it. Everyone has a niche, but you better find yours quick or someone else will take your spot. Everyone needs to stake out their territory. You look to your parents with resentment and spite. You push them away. You want them to leave. But you don’t want them to leave you. Being abandoned sucks. And it feels good to have someone to fall back on if we fail, and we seem to fail a lot in this life. Remember the things that matter. Look at the machines that do everything for us. What do we have that they don’t? We cry, we smile, we ****, and we fight. Try to see things, see new perspectives and ways of looking at things. Stop every once in a while and look at the flowers around you. They smell pretty nice. And don’t forget to get all up close to those things that interest you. Touch them, not just with your hands though! Touch lives; touch the hearts of those you care about. You will change their entire world. That’s the power a human has over a machine. Just be careful though. Remember the Romans? All they wanted to do was fight and ****. They lived on excess, brought on by the hard work of their ancestors. We live on the wave of a superficial pop culture. Try to avoid the wave. But there is one thing that is the most important, above all others. Breathe.
On The Run
Footsteps crashing in an alleyway, belonging to a pour soul on the run. The crushing sounds of electronic repetition assault us. Daily, we're assaulted with advertisements that are the same, over and over again, we see images of death and war on the nightly news and we are desensitized. Desolate wind in a technological soundscape whirl in the background. I had a dream once, I was in a graveyard of technology. I walked past mounds and mounds of abandoned circuitry and wire, all the computer chips were baked dry under a brutal desert sun. The graveyard ended, and before me was a vast empty wasteland. In the distance I saw a computer, rising up from the landscape. I ran after it, the only sign of salvation in this empty world. But it never got closer. I just kept running after it. Then suddenly it was gone. I looked around, and I was alone in the wasteland. The computer was just a mirage. I thought it would be my savior, an oasis in an empty world, but it ended up being the death of me. I started laughing. What else was there to do in such a dire situation? I got my bearings and went in the direction that looked the most promising. I don’t know how it ended though, since my alarm clock woke me up.
Notice the use of voices on this song. They start to get crazier, as if they can't stand the repitition anymore. How much of the same do you see everyday? I'm sure it would drive you crazy. This is why I love this album. Musically, it's excellent, and it introduces complex themes in subtle ways, using voices and other sounds from the modern world.
Time
Someone once said that time is the universe's greatest teacher, too bad it kills all its students. Time is without a doubt the most precious commodity in any of our lives. It slips through our fingers constantly. It's also a relative thing, Einstein proved that. If any of you live in small towns, look at the people who were born there, and are now adults and still live there. They went to school there and they probably married their High School sweethearts. This song basically talks about those people. The people who were popular in school but then wake up one day, ten years later and find themselves with a boring wife, boring kids and a boring job selling insurance back in their hometowns.
Those people had dreams. So what happened to them? They tried, and they got smacked down. It happens to all of us. You say you want to be something to your parents, and they either say it's ridiculous or they smack it down. You are told that you should get the jobs with the most money. Where is the happiness in any of these equations? Look at guys going through a mid-life crisis.
"And you run, and you run, to catch up with the sun but it's sinking. And racing around, to come up behind you again."
This reminds me of another of the 20th century's seminal pieces of art, like Dark Side of the Moon,
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you haven't read it, my god, read it. It's my favorite book. It's the tragedy of chasing the past, trying to recreate something that is no longer there. Here is a passage from it, that sums up everything.
Quote:
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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The Great Gig In The Sky
Some call this song, "The Mortality Section" or the part that deals with death. To that I sort of agree. The voice at the beginning talks about death. But to me, it isn't just that. When I hear C. Torry's vocals, inevitably, orgasm comes to mind. But in reality, there's nothing dirty about that concept alone. I think this is basically a celebration of of the extremes in life. The extreme ups, the extreme downs, because in a sense they are all connected, like ying and yang, dark and light, without one another they couldn't exist.
Due to character limits and convenience(since this is the end of the first side), the rest of the album will be reviewed in the next post.