As the classic Pink Floyd Album turns fifty it still resonates as a search for meaning in a hostile world
I’m sixteen years old, far from sober, gazing up at the star-filled sky and a soundtrack starts in my head. Ba-boom, ba-boom. It’s The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, and I know each word, each beat, each audio trick.
The album’s fifty years old this month, with forty-five million records sales and counting. I listened to it so much I had to stop, but returning to Dark Side after many years, I still love the way it grapples with big themes – time, war, money. I still love the sense of existential searching.
As I hear it, from the opening heartbeat, Dark Side tracks the journey of a living soul through a hostile world. Swirling synths and guitars evoke grounded-ness, inviting me to groove along. But other rhythms intervene – the pulse of fear, the driving power of ‘Money’. New car, caviar, four-star daydream, think I’ll buy me a football team. It doesn’t go out of date.
The music we discover in our teens shapes many of us. Pink Floyd spoke to my wish to find my own ground as an individual, resisting compromised, inauthentic values. Dark Side also spoke to a yearning for a world of meaning that’s out there somewhere, just out of reach.
In my case, that took me to the Buddha. If you dig behind the legendary accounts of the Buddha’s early life you can hear in the ancient texts the voice of a troubled youth encountering a world that seems to lack essence. He shakes with fear as he watches people writhe and fight like fish in shallow water.
He later reflected that it’s a kind of madness to live in a way that denies impermanence and struggles for security; and that view, complete with its un-p.c. language, pervades Dark Side. The album describes a battle with the world in which defeat means slipping through the cracks, your thoughts drowning amid the competing voices in your head. It’s a struggle the Buddha had left behind.
I now think Dark Side of the Moon suggests two conflicting views of life. One has faith in the possibility of a meaningful existence, while the other tumbles, defeated, into nihilism, and at the album’s grand conclusion the two remain irreconcilably at odds:
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
I know which one I try to follow.
