Happy 45th Anniversary to Pink Floyd’s tenth studio album Animals, originally released in the UK January 21, 1977 and in the US February 12, 1977.
Animals was a new beginning for Pink Floyd and the beginning of the end. After this, the band, in its most well-known quartet format, would never officially exist again. Animals is the album many diehard fans proudly proclaim as their favorite, that contains none of the “money cuts” (pun intended) you grew up hearing on the radio, back when radio was still a thing. It’s the album that keyboardist/singer Richard Wright hates, for which guitarist/singer David Gilmour often equivocates and bassist/singer/principal-songwriter Roger Waters passionately advocates.
It doesn’t take a psychology degree to see how or why each party (diehards, casuals, individual band members) might arrive at their take. Your feelings on Animals likely depends on your respective stake. For Waters, it was the first time he became the lone songwriter on a Pink Floyd album, save a sole co-writing credit from Gilmour on “Dogs,” springing from an unfinished song originally titled “You’ve Got To Be Crazy” from the Wish You Were Here sessions.
Animals is precisely 41 minutes, 41 seconds long. Yet it’s intense enough to feel like 82 by the time it’s through. Animals is a concept album that lists five animal-titled tracks, but it’s done a disservice if experienced as anything other than one long song. If you start or end anywhere but the two parts of “Pigs On The Wing,” without listening in order to everything in between? You’re doing it wrong.
Pink Floyd had seen leadership and lineup shifts dating back to the acid-aided breakdown of former leading man Syd Barrett. Barrett was the band’s transmission during their early ascent, playing underground rock clubs in swinging London during 1966 before signing their record deal in 1967, with Barrett penning almost all the material on their acclaimed debut, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. However, within months of that initial success, Barrett’s regular LSD use combined with undiagnosed mental illness resulted in him being, according to bandmate Nick Mason, “completely detached from everything going on.”
Within a year, Syd was—save a credit or two on songs he’d previously written used over the next few albums—for all intents and purposes, gone. Each remaining member of the band (Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, and relatively new-in-’67-addition David Gilmour) had in their own fashion expanded their horizons and found ways to step up into the leadership breach, whether it meant singing, songwriting, or playing instrumental lead. But the specter of Barrett’s fate would go on to haunt, bond, and inspire their future proceedings like PTSD.
Animals arrived either directly on the heels, or right smack dab in the middle, of Pink Floyd’s critical and commercial apex. It depends on who you ask. 1975’s Wish You Were Here, replete with its bookending song-suite salute to Barrett “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V and VI-IX),” sold twenty million records worldwide. And even that was still considered a drop-off, critically and commercially, to the work that preceded it: 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, one of the most acclaimed and highest-selling albums of all-time, which to date has sold forty-five.
That level of omnipresence put an experimental, previously underground London band into a mind-flip-fuckery blender while becoming the biggest rock band in the world, bar none. For the younger readers who grew up after rock music was no longer the lingua franca of the cultural zeitgeist, just try imagining whatever it was that Radiohead were moping about in the 1998 documentary-film Meeting People Is Easy, and then turn the knobs up to one-hundred-and-eleven.
Animals arrived in 1977, with Floyd almost an antithesis of musical movements bubbling around the streets of London ten years after they’d signed. Or were they? Perception, at least, said so at the time. The Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten was famously noted as wearing a homemade “I Hate Pink Floyd” shirt in their feature for Rolling Stone later that year. Rotten has since changed his tune. Many others have too. Because although Pink Floyd had by then been embraced by the establishment, Animals was and remains an explicitly clear rejection of it.
Drummer Nick Mason even produced the second album by arguably the UK’s first punk band, The Damned, after failing to nab their reclusive first choice, his former bandmate Syd Barrett. The iconoclastic thematic approach of Animals should resonate within many factions of musical flock, whether old and bored enough to be “dinosaurs,” or young and unsullied enough to be “punk rock” or “hip-hop.”
If you didn’t care, what happens to me…and I didn’t care, for you.
Try that thought exercise in the form of melancholic opening line on for size.
Prescient words many moons ago that eerily foretold a sinkhole of the soul?
Or a seventies prog-rock band whose leader (Waters) read a lot of George Orwell, checked the social-political conditions outside in the late-seventies, then leaned into the dystopian themes that keep a species of sentient beings blessed and cursed enough to witness but unable to prevent history from perpetually repeating?
Someone who tackles big issues that haunt the human condition, but lacks the tools to interact peacefully with four fellow humans who made timeless music, but whom have barely been able to tick away a few minutes together in the same room, even with two of the other four now in a tomb, while the remaining few steadily grow shorter of breath, one day, closer to death.
Wondering which of the buggers to blame…And watching for pigs on the wing.
This album, like literary landmarks Animal Farm and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis before it, utilize animal imagery to conjure up an existential threat. But each author knows the true terror that they futilely attempt to reject is the awareness we have, which makes us a different kind of beast than the other creatures that occupy jungles, and those that become prey or pets.
The two parts of “Pigs On The Wing” that open and close the proceedings are the short (1:25 each), sweetly delivered (think Waters subbing in for the Gilmour lead vocals on “Wish You Were Here”) acoustical breading holding together the contents of an “oh, shit!” sandwich. You need these crucial top-and-bottom slices to maintain structural integrity. The small morsels of optimism contained within them, is necessary to digest the three heaping helpings of mystery meat served up on “Dogs,” “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” and “Sheep,” consecutively. Let’s dig into that meat, shall we? “How can you have any pudding if you can’t eat your-“…sorry, everybody, I couldn’t resist.
Speaking of irresistible, Dogs, Bruh…
Even for the mid-seventies and a psychedelic/prog-album-rock band known for fully committed exercises in musical epic, “Dogs” is a sonic saga of unprecedented scope. So have a good drown, as you go down. When Gilmour remarked later that Animals “…was exciting and noisy and fun. It really had some great bits and stuff of effects on there, but it was not one of our creative high points really,” even if you disagree, it’s easy to imagine at least one of those “great bits” of which he speaks.
For yours truly, “Dogs” is David Gilmour at his performative peak, on guitar and vocally. Gilmour’s baritone has long been, almost by default, this band’s most conventionally accepted voice tonally. But he steps out of his comfort zone for his only lead here with unprecedented urgency. While we mentioned Waters aping Gilmour on “Pigs On the Wing”, the deep bite in Gilmour’s bark on “Dogs” shows Waters that he’s also quite capable of doing his thing.
Then there’s those guitar bits. A sonic lightning storm of string-bending harmonic wails juxtaposed against reverberating echo stabs sounding like the hounds of Hell. Paired with Waters’ lyrical/vocal contributions and Wright’s impossibly funky synths punctuated by Mason’s percussive kick, these seventeen minutes encapsulate everything that seventies Floyd does well.
While that means ascending to heights few bands scaled before or since, they continue to ratchet up the tension as “Dogs” howls right into “Pigs.” Animal noises fed thru vocoders, guitar pyrotechnics, synths, and who-knows-what-else create a captivating cacophony. Are those modulated barks of dogs, or are they snorts from hogs? Does it matter? Well, not really. Naw.
While “Dogs” is this album’s musical zenith, for those needing to delineate, “Pigs” feels like its thematic mission statement. This is Roger Waters doing what he loves to do: tell the truth, shame the devil, and toss in a few righteously indignant “fuck you”-s. The bile unleashed, armed alongside organ creeps and guitar talk-box squeaks, has Waters spitting in the eye of real-world foes viewed as sinister: greed merchants of the ruling class, amoral campaigning moralists, the American President, the British Prime Minister.
The floating pig pictured on the album’s cover, suspended between smokestacks of London’s decommissioned Battersea Power Station, went on to become one of the most iconic stage-props in concert history. From the opening leg of In The Flesh, to the Gilmour-led and Waters-less Pink Floyd stadium shows of the late-80’s/mid-90’s, thru Waters’ solo Dark Side/Wall/In The Flesh revivals that continued into the late-2010s, a floating pig gets dug up like a truffle for any major Floyd-related-tour each take.
I feel blessed to have seen that pig floating above the fray in since-demolished Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia on The Division Bell tour in ’94. When Waters and his band performed on Night One (of three) at Hollywood Bowl in ‘06 Los Angeles, I was in the cheap seats watching a grafitti-d pig (with slogans like “Impeach Bush Now,” “Kafka Rules, OK?” and “Free At Last” on it) moving beyond us after Roger cut the cords, sailing away on the night’s sky into the hillside. It was reportedly found the next morning, laying deflated on the front lawn of a neighboring estate high up in the Hollywood Hills. The jokes write themselves.
When you’re done getting your eyebrows singed by the guitar heat at the end of “Pigs,” in comes the bah-bah sounds and opening bass rumblings of “Sheep.” “Sheep,” like “Dogs” before it, started out as a holdover from 1974, a song previously known as “Raving and Drooling” recorded for the Wish You Were Here sessions, but subsequently lying on the cutting-room floor. Like the docile creatures that inspire its title, and perhaps society at large metaphorically, by this point as a listener over the past thirty-plus minutes, we’ve nearly been pounded into submission. While “Pigs” is clearly intended as a critique of capitalism, “Sheep” adds in an even more popular opiate of the masses: religion. Specifically, in terms of the linguistic imagery, the chosen European tonic of Christianity.
Midway thru this, our now third straight ten-minute-plus opus, momentum starts to sag a bit. Perhaps it’s due to all the darkness we’ve been navigating thru, or the fact that you notice similar note clusters re-used for more ponderous transitions on Animals’ bloated double-length follow-up, The Wall. Whatever the case might be, exhaustion might start setting in somewhere around the church hymn and organ-led 5-6 minute-marker of “Sheep.” How many more miles to go before we sleep?
And just as you’re wondering when it might end, as if this is almost exactly the effect the band had planned, they stomp back into the song’s conclusion signaling alarm to make sure you’re fully awake. Long before “woke” became yet another term misunderstood and bastardized by primarily white folk, Waters was calling on people to shoot up from slumber to resist manipulation in big numbers.
Sentiments that remain as true today as they were back then, and undoubtedly had already been for hundreds and thousands of years before then. Individualistic thought that shows empathy for your fellow Earthly inhabitants. Peace. Love. A few of our favorite promises, repeatedly broken, while existing within the parameters of the human condition. And just as it’s all starting to either make sense, or signify a swan song into a madness-inducing fever dream descent, we hear those liltingly beautiful acoustic-guitar chords that started it all again:
You know that I care what happens to you…And I know that you care for me too
Indeed.
Agreed.
Any fool knows a dog needs a home.
Animals buries its bone deep in your dome.
READ MORE about Pink Floyd here
LISTEN: