Happy 50th Anniversary to Pink Floyd’s eighth studio album The Dark Side of the Moon, originally released in the US March 1, 1973 and in the UK March 16, 1973.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about chaos. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the vast interiority of a person, and how it’s impossible to fully map the terrain of oneself. Relationships and interactions are collisions of people-in-progress, and fully knowing another person, let alone the world at large, is an impossible order.
Or, as Tolstoy put it, “A sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him and something narrow and fleshy that he himself…was.”
This thing is infinitely great and indefinable—hard to articulate—but there is a pretty good representation of it, and it’s The Dark Side of the Moon.
Enough of this record’s legend has circulated in popular culture in the last fifty years, so if you’re looking for another piece on its influence on rock history, this isn’t that. It’s obviously an enormous aesthetic and technological achievement, a band at the height of their powers wielding the full weight of their medium. But the legend of Dark Side of the Moon is, in my experience, a detriment to getting to its core.
I first came to the record at age fifteen, more than thirty years after it was established as a visionary moment in the history of rock music (and t-shirt design). Indeed, in those early days, it was impossible to process Dark Side without thinking about it as an achievement. My favorite moment on the record was the final couplet, with the lyric “but the sun is eclipsed by the moon,” which to me represented the power of the album to overshadow everything in the rock music landscape. It was a celebration of itself, a victory lap, acknowledgement of a monumental artistic achievement. A moment of certainty and definition.
During a sleepless night a few weeks ago, I put the record on for the first of many listens in explicit preparation for this article. I knew I had a lot to look forward to, like Clare Torry’s cathartic vocal solo on “The Great Gig in the Sky” (still a highlight) and the genius contrast between hard rock and sensitivity on “Time.”
But the tune that got me this time around was “On the Run,” an instrumental that I used to think of as a few minutes of nothing between the album’s overture and its unprecedented middle suite of “Time,” “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and “Money.” On this listen, the literal breathlessness of “On the Run,” the footsteps, and the Doppler-like sound of the synthesizer, produced a feeling of complete disorientation. The anxiety of this instrumental communicated to me more clearly than any of the album’s lyrics did. I realized that this was the sound of the thing I had been feeling: of searching for a way to connect to oneself and, by extension, other people, but having a hard time doing so because of the fundamental disorientations of life.
Listen to the Album:
“On the Run” had never felt like a part of the album’s legend. Maybe at that time I hadn’t been through enough for it to resonate with me. The more in-your-face lyrical tracks seemed like the essence of the message, but they were also the ones that I heard on the radio and knew as defining Pink Floyd cuts. Before Dark Side of the Moon became what it was, this record was an earnest attempt to capture that elusive feeling that I still can’t name; “On the Run” was just as integral to that story as “Time” and “Eclipse.”
I should note here that “On the Run” is not exactly a subtle piece of music. The footsteps and whirring synthesizer, along with the airline announcements, make it clear that this is supposed to be an anxiety-producing piece. But through the way that the album circulated in the popular discourse, I just assumed that it was filler that didn’t add as much to the narrative as the rest of the work. But when you think of it as the center of the album, everything else begins to make a lot more sense.
The paralyzed uncertainty of “On the Run” makes the other tracks stronger. For example, it supplements “Money” by adding a referent to the instrumental interlude “Money.” As with “On the Run,” David Gilmour’s guitar work in the bridge of “Money” is intentionally disorienting, avoiding the melodic approach that makes up his signature sound. By the time you get to the end of the second guitar solo and crash back into the verse, a few things happen at once.
First, the instrumental section is in 4/4, a more traditional time signature for rock music. But the verses are in 7/4, which sounds a little off to most listeners. But because 7/4 was established earlier in the song, and 4/4 is rendered so incomprehensible by the instrumental break, 7/4 actually feels like a relief. The “normal” state of things (the part in 4/4) is humanity at its most confused and disoriented. We did something unnatural (regulated the world through commerce and greed) to wrangle that feeling of uncertainty—we opted for 7/4. Because we can’t process the mania of the guitar solo, which produces the same anxieties in us that “On the Run” does and encompasses the huge unknowability of humanity, we turn to something unnatural like money that makes things seem normal.
Before I saw “On the Run” in this way, I thought of “Money” as an outlier on Dark Side of the Moon, a heavy-handed and predictable capitalism critique that didn’t get into the themes of madness and death that defines the record. But by focusing on the part of the record that I so often overlooked when I was focusing on its legend, I was able to see so much more in the legendary moments.
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I still don’t have an answer to my big question. I don’t know how you really get to know yourself, or how that helps you (or doesn’t) learn more about other people. But Dark Side of the Moon gave me more ways to process that question, and that’s where you have to start.
What I do know is this: The mistake that I made with Dark Side of the Moon was that I thought that I knew it. It was represented to me as a definitive item, a milestone moment in music history, something by people who knew what madness and despair and death were all about. They didn’t. This is an album of questions. I’m realizing now that pretending like we know something, or someone, or ourselves, is what’s going to make it harder to see all of the layers in all of their complex beauty. I tried to do it with Dark Side of the Moon, and now I’m going to try it with myself.
LISTEN: