Pink Floyd’s The Darkish Facet of the Moon Turns 50: Hear It Get Psychoanalyzed by Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin

Coming after the maturation of the marketplace for high-fidelity stereo programs however earlier than the appearance of house video, the nineteen-seventies offered simply the precise cultural and financial situations for a heroic age of the report album. What’s Going On, Blue, Blood on the Tracks, Exile on Most important Avenue, Born to Run, Rumours, Aja: that these and different seventies releases at all times rank excessive on best-of-all-time lists might be no accident. However no different mega-selling album of that decade achieved fairly the mix of business and demanding success as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which was initially launched fifty years in the past yesterday — and which stays on the Billboard charts in the present day.

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“In 1973, Pink Floyd was a considerably identified progressive rock band,” writes neuroscientist and music producer Daniel Levitin, however The Darkish Facet of the Moon “catapulted them into world class rock-star standing.”

Its masterful engineering “propelled the music off of any sound system to change into an all-encompassing, immersive expertise” comprising songs that “move into each other symphonically, with seamless musical coherence, as if written as a part of a single melodic and harmonic gesture. Lyric themes of insanity and alienation join all through,” enlivened by an “array of recent digital sounds, spatialization, pitch and time bending” in addition to “clocks, alarms, chimes, money registers, footsteps” and different components not usually heard in rock music.

This description comes from an essay Levitin wrote for the Library of Congress in 2012, when The Darkish Facet of the Moon was inducted into the US Nationwide Recording Registry. For the album’s fiftieth anniversary, Nationwide Public Radio’s Morning Version invited him to psychoanalyze it on-air. “Themes of insanity and alienation permeate the report,” he says, making reference to the story of departed Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett. However “we are able to’t know for positive which particular lyrics have been about Barrett, as opposed, extra typically, to psychological anguish,” a situation sure to afflict anybody too deep into the rock-star life-style.

In The Darkish Facet of the Moon‘s lyrics Levitin hears Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters’ metaphorical remedy of the troublesome resolution to fireplace Barrett, in addition to his realization that “life wasn’t going to begin later. It had began. And the concept of ‘Time’ was to understand the reins and begin guiding your individual future.” As on the album as a complete, the theme comes via in not simply the phrases however the soundscape: “Proper off the bat, they’re taking part in with time. You hear that clop-clop sound, like a heartbeat or a clock ticking. And also you suppose that the higher-pitched one is the downbeat. However as quickly because the devices are available, you understand you’re off the beat, and every little thing’s the other way up. And your sense of time is distorted.”

Musical artistry accounts partly for the album’s large success partly, however solely partly. Storm Thorgerson’s iconic cowl artwork, nonetheless seen on the partitions of faculty dorm rooms in the present day, additionally had one thing to do with its success as each cultural phenomenon and client product. Nevertheless it might hardly have bought greater than 45 million copies up to now with out chancing to hit the zeitgeist at a positive angle: as Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason stated, it was “not solely about being an excellent album but in addition about being in the precise place on the proper time.” And with the heroic age of the album lengthy over, The Darkish Facet of the Moon — a newly re-recorded model of which Waters announced just this year — isn’t about to be eclipsed.

Associated content material:

Pink Floyd’s Entire Studio Discography is Now on YouTube: Stream the Studio & Live Albums

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8-Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Classic Album

Watch Documentaries on the Making of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Download Pink Floyd’s 1975 Comic Book Program for The Dark Side of the Moon Tour

A Live Studio Cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Played from Start to Finish

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Other Pink Floyd Songs Gloriously Performed by Irish & German Orchestras

Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embrace the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The City in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.