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Student

Dr. Harrison

English 103

5 February 2021

Hanging on in Quiet Desperation: Internal Tensions in Dark Side of the Moon

Da da da dum… The four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, recognizable even

in written form, introduce a four-part composition which takes nearly forty minutes to perform and

comprises multiple movements interconnected by musical motifs. Thematically connecting parts of

a composition into a larger whole is a tradition which goes back centuries in Western classical

music, yet in most contemporary twentieth-century music, the focus was on much shorter works;

compared to an hour-long symphony, a three minute single is far more suitable for radio play or for

dancing. In the latter third of the twentieth century, however, rock music revisited the classical

tradition with the emergence of the concept album—a work whose “music, imagery, and … lyrics

are conceptually linked to a single overall theme or unified story” (Rose 8). Perhaps no musician

has been as dedicated to this form as former Pink Floyd front man and bassist Roger Waters, who

has masterminded ten concept albums (five Pink Floyd albums, four solo albums, and an opera).

Many of the recurring themes that he explored more deeply in his later work appeared initially in

Pink Floyd’s first concept album, Dark Side of the Moon, an album heavily influenced by Waters’

vision. This album explores the things which drive people mad, or as Waters puts it, the “pressures

which are anti-life” (Miles 92). This discourse on the stresses and strains of life—the passage of

time, work, money, war, madness, and death—takes the form of an oblique one-sided dialogue,

expressed as two voices seeking to guide a notional youth through adulthood. The dialogue

oscillates between hope and despair, between optimism and pessimism, between scornful censure

and soothing support. It does this not only lyrically but musically as the instrumental work on the

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album similarly fluctuates between conflicting emotional states. The vacillation of this dialogue

reveals a further and perhaps most significant stress—that of priorities and of pressures that, no

matter what, cannot possibly all be satisfied. Dark Side of the Moon, then, not only discusses

timeless themes of the human condition, but by implying that it is impossible to satisfy all of life’s

demands, it encourages the listener to distinguish in their own lives between those things that are

genuinely important and those things which may be seductively and immediately enticing yet are

ultimately inconsequential or even ruinous.

In December of 1971, in a London warehouse that belonged to the Rolling Stones, the

members of Pink Floyd had a jam session (Classic 00:08:13). Their goal was to start creating the

music to accompany bassist Roger Waters’ ideas for a concept album that, as Waters put it, would

“come down to earth a bit, get a bit less involved with flights of fancy and a bit more involved with

what we as people are actually involved in” (Schaffner 171). Combining new ideas with existing

unused material, and drawing both from their personal histories and from the band’s recent loss to

drugs and madness of founding member Syd Barrett, they crafted a series of thematically connected

ideas that they collectively called “Eclipse.” After polishing these ideas in live performances for

nearly a year, in 1972 the band assembled in Abbey Road Studios to record their work. The

resulting album, The Dark Side of the Moon, represented not only the apotheosis of years of musical

growth and experimentation, but also the lasting emotional and psychological impact of the loss of

Syd.

Lyrically, The Dark Side of the Moon had some of its earliest roots in “Echoes,” a twenty-

three-minute song from Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle. Of this song, Roger Waters says that “it

was the beginning of empathy … ‘two strangers passing in the street / by chance two passing

glances meet / and I am you and what I see is me’ is a sort of thread that’s gone through everything

for me ever since then, and had a big eruption in Dark Side” (Classic 00:06:05). He combined this

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“expression of political, philosophical, and humanitarian empathy” (00:00:40) with criticisms of the

forces responsible for some of life’s greater pressures to create an album whose lyrics seem to

encourage multiple perspectives in the listener—perspectives which are sometimes mutually

exclusive and frequently ambiguous. Waters’ feels that this ambiguity, this frequent lack of a clear

“best” perspective or course of action, is true of life itself:

There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual that color his view of

existence. There are pressures that are capable of pushing you in one direction or another,

and these are some of them—and whether they push you towards insanity, death, empathy,

greed, whatever, there's something about the Newtonian view of that physics that might be

interesting and maybe … what this record is about. (00:07:22)

The album’s approach to music works in much the same way: ambiguous chords add musical

tension by omitting notes that identify them as major or minor, environmental sounds create or

increase psychological tension, and pieces of dialog further guide the emotional direction of the

music. Brief bursts of sonic energy (in, for example, “On the Run,” “Time,” and “Money”) are

incongruous with the generally languorous backdrop of the rest of the album, described by Genesis

guitarist Steve Hackett as having a “slightly somnambulant aspect with [a] preference for slow

rhythms” (Popoff 110). These interruptions provide quick, short, sharp shocks to the psyches of

listeners otherwise mesmerized by the rest of the reverie-inducing rhythms. Even the album title

contributes to the tension and theme of madness; lunacy and lunatic both derive from latin lunaticus

meaning madness, a condition which was thought to be caused by the moon.

The album’s opening piece, “Speak to Me,” marks the beginning of the discussion of the

human condition by marking the beginning of a human life, as silence slowly gives way to the

steady sound of a beating heart. This heartbeat’s tempo is 60 beats per minute, which is a healthy

resting heart rate in adult humans. The relatively slow tempo creates a sympathetic slowing of the

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listener’s heart rate (Bernardi 449), inducing in the listener a sense of calm tranquility. Soon,

however, a number of other sounds begin to appear, adding multiple layers of auditory imagery to

the ever-steady heartbeat. These new layers of sound, atonal and dissonant, slowly add tension to

the song, culminating finally in a series of rising human screams.

Opera and symphonies often begin with an overture—a piece intended to introduce the

audience to the larger work. In much the same way, “Speak to Me” serves as an overture for The

Dark Side of the Moon. Each new sound not only serves to add tension to the song itself, therewith

setting the mood for the entire album, but also provides a musical preview of things to come:

ticking clocks preview “Time,” cash registers return in “Money,” oscillating synthesizer pulses

reappear in “On the Run,” and finally, spoken commentary about madness combines with maniacal

laughter to not only foreshadow “Brain Damage” but also to hint at one of the main themes of the

album, madness and the fear of going mad.

In the song’s final seconds, a series of rising screams introduce a new life to the world. This

life, as it becomes an adult, will be the nominal audience towards whom much of the rest of the

album is directed. The mother has already suffered the stresses previewed in this song, and knows

that her offspring is destined to suffer the same. Her screams are thus not only screams of childbirth,

but of her accumulated frustration and anxiety; they are, finally, the screams of eventual madness

brought on by the anti-life pressures foreshadowed in this song. Life begins with pain and madness,

the song implies, yet even as it makes this implication, the steady and soporific heartbeat never

changes. This dichotomy, too, is a preview of the rest of the album, introducing conflict and natural

tension that the listener must decide on their own how to resolve.