dark, “Us and Them”) suggests a dialectical understanding of material contradictions. The conflict between opposites (night vs. I don’t know if Waters’s socialist leanings have ever gone as far as outright Marxism, but his atheism surely leads to a materialist conception of the world. “…all you touch and all you see/Is all your life will ever be.” Reality is materialist. When you “choose your own ground,” is it yours by right to have, or do you just think it’s yours, when really you’ve just chosen it by taking it from others? “ Breathe, breathe in the air/Don’t be afraid to care.” What kind of air are we breathing? The beautiful, fresh air of nature that we should care about, or the filthy air of the city, which we shouldn’t be afraid to care about cleaning up? Speak to me, indeed, of your suffering: only by giving expression to your pain will you cure it. Hence, in ‘ Speak to Me,’ we hear the cash register that we’ll hear again in ‘Money,’ the clock ticking in ‘Time,’ Claire Torry‘s scream from ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’ manic laughter from ‘Brain Damage,’ and the helicopter sound from ‘On the Run,’ as well as the voices of people discussing their own madness. The recording begins with a fading-in heartbeat, the beginning of life but even in birth, there is suffering, as the Buddha taught us: “birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering union with what is displeasing is suffering separation from what is pleasing is suffering not to get what one wants is suffering in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.” The sun gives us that light, but night after night, as the moon wanes, we get more and more of her dark side. dark, or how we lose the light of truth–which, when reflected on, gives us all the colours of life–and find ourselves instead shrouded in darkness. The cover, a black background with a line of light going through a prism to reveal a spectrum of colours, establishes–with the album’s title–one of its main motifs: light vs. Here is a link to all the lyrics (and spoken dialogue) on the album. So out of respect for his principled stance on these issues, I want to honour an album that conceptually was based on his ideas (i.e., the lyrics). This worthiness is so especially when seen in light of Roger Waters‘s championing of Palestinian, Syrian, and Brazilian civil rights. The album is not my personal favourite, as I much prefer the Syd Barrett era, but I do consider its themes of madness, greed, materialism, stressing over time, and human conflict well worth exploring. The album was on the Billboard charts from 1973 to 1988, and is considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time. It is widely considered the band’s masterpiece.
The Dark Side of the Moon is a concept album by Pink Floyd, released in 1973, with Alan Parsons as the engineer.
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