Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon reached a monumental 1500 weeks on billboard's charts last week. This is impressive, to say the least.
Roger Waters was interviewed about the album's 1500 week landmark at billboard:
I felt a need to include the human voice on the record, so I devised this way of asking people questions in a particular order that would elicit responses that were interesting.
...The first one was, "When was the last time you were violent?" And when you�d answer that one, you�d move on to the next question, "Were you in the right?" And then there were some questions about dark side of the moon...
But the "Were you in the right?" got terrific responses from people...
I was the youngest of four, and my two oldest brothers spun Dark Side of the Moon on the turntable more times than I can count. When I was old enough to understand what cursing was, I would wait for the "don�t give me that do goody good bullshit" line to play on the song Money, and I would giggle to myself because I heard someone say shit. Later, I would bring my friends to the house when no one was home and play the line over and over while we'd laugh at the dirty word.
I'm surprised the song Money hasn't been heralded in libertarian circles. Maybe there is a Pink Floydian subset of the big-L libertarians, but it has been said that Roger Waters detests libertarians. A stagehand at the 1978 Phoenix concert of Animals claims he overhead Waters exclaim to a roadie during a heated political debate regarding the subject of libertarians:
It is unclear what Waters' true political leanings are. It has been rumored that he had a short, tawdry affair with the author Ayn Rand. Though Rand was much older than Waters, and their tryst was brief, it is said that much of the inspiration for Money was derived from their association. What is clear is that libertarians have always had an affinity for acid and rock & roll, and will listen for hours on end to any concept album they can get their hands on."They are not defenders of capitalism. They�re a group of publicity seekers... most of them are my enemies... I�ve read nothing by a Libertarian (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn�t my ideas badly mishandled--i.e., had the teeth pulled out of them--with no credit given.[1]"
The first compact disk I ever saw was a copy of Dark Side of The Moon. My friend, Steve Mrozinski (Mr. O.), had received a CD player for his birthday, and Dark Side of the Moon was his first CD. He pulled it out of the CD tray and threw it across the room. We watched it careen off the wall and fall behind his bed. He ran over and grabbed it, held it up in the air smiling, and said, "See, no scratches. It's indestructible." He proceeded to ramble on about broken records and digital recordings and how it's all just ones and zeros on the disk, but I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I just wanted to get stoned and listen to Dark Side of the Moon.
In the mid to late seventies Johnny Rotten wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words 'I Hate' scrawled in felt-tip pen above their name[2]. This signals the backlash towards Pink Floyd and seventies mainstream rock music from the burgeoning punk scene that followed. As I grew older in the late eighties, Dark Side of the Moon became a cliche, a joke regarding classic rock radio. Money being the second most overplayed song in radio history behind Stairway to Heaven. Yet, I can't deny the hours I spent listening to Dark Side of the Moon. The album has been background music for much of my life, from early childhood until well into my teens. It is hard for me to separate the music and the memories it invokes. If I heard it today for the first time would I appreciate it? Would I find it listenable? As it stands, I am incapable of discerning the musical value from my own historical and emotional context.
After reading the Roger Waters article in Billboard, I cued up the album in iTunes (look Mr. O., no scratches). I sat and listened, attempting to leave the music uncolored by history, to listen with new ears. There were a few points where I thought for a moment of objective clarity that, yes, this is good, this is very good, but it'd be a lot better if I had an eigth ounce of thai-stick.
[1] - Libertarianism and Acid Rock - wikipedia.
[2] - Johnny_Rotten - wikipedia,
