I. DSOTM -- INTRODUCTION & HISTORY & BACKGROUND:
A. Rock's Lunar Cycles:

As in life itself, Rock & Roll's ongoing popularity and survival is due to its cyclical nature; it's perpetual metamorphosis. Nowhere is this theme more evident and poignantly conveyed than in Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon." DSOTM arrived at; was a product of, the gloomy period in rock history that followed the death of that musical era's "big three;" Jim, Janice and Jimi, at the end of the1960's. Just as the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper & Richie Valens at the end of the 1950's were for many, "the day the music died," this second "trinitarian cataclysm" was in actuality, the harbinger of Rock's second "dark side of the moon" cyclical phase.

B. The Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon Lunar Phase:

On a microcosmic level, Pink Floyd itself had been forced to face its own dark, "New Moon" phase and potential mortality after booting Syd Barrett and taking on David Gilmour in 1968. Syd, who had been the heart and soul of the early ethereal, psychedelic PF, had become their dysfunctional waning moon due to latent insanity triggered by the pressures of success. Though many believe Barrett's rapid deterioration resulted from profligate use of acid, Pink Floyd's DSOTM is a persuasively articulated musical declaration by Roger Waters that some individuals can attain literary greatness despite "handicapping" the creative process with a heavy and regular consumption of recreational drugs.

II. DSOTM -- UNDERSTANDING ROCK'S QUINTESSENTIAL "CONCEPT ALBUM:"
A. A Conceptual Musical Analysis:

Critics and fans generally agree that Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" is the quintessential progressive rock "concept album" of the 1970's. A concept or "theme album" is simply an album whose musical tracks are linked together by a concept or theme. In some cases, as here, the concept is represented by a symbol that incorporates the salient characteristics and recurrent themes common to the album's component songs, and unify them into a cohesive whole. For this reason, the concept album format lends itself to the writing of a review that addresses the album's various tracks by analyzing and discussing the thematic elements common to all of them. It is in this manner the following review approaches its analysis of the music of DSOTM.

B. A Heavenly Compositional Body

Though the album is both a tour de force of Pink Floyd's musical range and technical virtuosity, and Waters' peerless genius for writing profoundly evocative, yet unforced lyrical metaphors; it is the album's bold choice of an epic subject matter, the tragedy of the human condition, which propels this composition from being merely one of the greater magnitude stars twinkling brightly in the heavenly body of musical creativity from which the 1970's music constellation is formed, but rather an independent constellation in and of its own right, a watershed from whose magnitude of creative brightness the 1970's musical legacy gains definition, measure and literary validation.

C. Lunar Symbolism

Based on the content and mood of the album taken as a whole, the metaphorically suggestive title, "Dark Side of the Moon," traces the album's literary roots to the dark, creatively fertile soil previously tilled and cultivated by the French Symbolists, whose defining poetic trait was to employ common, physical objects and forms as symbols for purposes of communicating abstract ideas and ephemeral concepts, but in a visceral, more sensual manner. By creating a literary bridge over the previously untraversed gap separating mental experience from physical sensation, the Symbolists, in effect, made "a word worth a thousand pictures."

Therein lies the secret of the evocative intensity of Waters' lyrics throughout the album, and specifically underscored in the brooding romanticism of its gloomy title. Waters effectively employs an archetypal symbol; the moon, to evoke emotion on multiple psychic levels. On a more obvious level, Waters draws on the physical qualities we commonly associate with the Moon. Specifically, Waters' moon is at once silent, melancholy, lonely, desolate and perhaps beautiful, but in a somber way. It is the only bright object in an otherwise pervasive tapestry of musical darkness. At first, his moon appears to affirm life by openly defying the fatal, all-consuming night with its rebellious, life-suggestive moonlight. This defiant contrast of the moonlight against darkness lends the moon a Promethean aura of stoic strength; stubborn independence.

D. A Trick Of The Moonlight

On a deeper level, we are forced to acknowledge that the moon doesn't generate its own light; it merely reflects the light of the sun, which for all its light source, is consumed by the darkness. Further, the moon is a slave to its orbit around the earth, which means that, though temporarily luminous, it will inevitably, on its new moon or "dark side of the moon" phase, leave the night sky utterly dark and devoid of life and, more ominously, the hope for life. The life/hope-affirming qualities; the stubborn defiance, the resolute independence, the cyclical regularity and consistency of degree of travel, all merely a mockery of life's transient nature, an illusion calculated to raise our hopes just high enough to allow us a temporarily unobstructed view of the tragic and inescapably hopeless nature of the human condition.

E. A Legacy Of Lunacy

Waters ingeniously draws on another, less apparent, yet more insidious characteristic associated with the literary symbol of the moon, i.e., insanity or "lune-acy", with which to accommodate the other theme which pervades the album's music and lyrics: the madness which either A), one requires to accommodate the folly of false hope, strength and defiance of death which is temporarily simulated by the apparent consistency of life's hypnotically and rhythmically cyclical day-to-day events, or B), results when one confronts the naked reality of the ultimately inescapable and tragic hopelessness of the human condition. Since madness options "A" and "B" are the only apparent alternatives available, one may logically extrapolate that one is at all times, either insane or dead. The disillusioned Waters, who reluctantly ascended to the position of Pink Floyd's artistic "new moon" in the shadowy songwriting and leadership void that remained in the wake of schizophrenia's rapid dousing of Barrett's creative luminescence, no doubt also considered himself a potential heir to the pressure-induced fate that devoured his predecessor's sanity.

III. DSOTM -- MUSIC TRACKS
A. The Musically Expressed Complementarity Of The Inevitability Of Mortality Set Off Against The Lunacy Of Day-To-Day Existence:

--The following are DSOTM's 9 tracks:

Tracks:
1a. Speak To Me || 1b. Breathe In The Air
2. On The Run
3. Time
4. The Great Gig In The Sky
5. Money
6. Us And Them
7. Any Colour You Like
8. Brain Damage
9. Eclipse

From the album's opening track, "Speak To Me's" dramatic lead-in; an adumbrating cacophony of mechanical, "daily-noise" sounds which iterates into a rising crescendo of hebephrenic laughter (i.e., insane laughter in response to inappropriate stimuli common to hebephrenic schizophrenia,) before erupting into a series of brain-bursting, screams of helpless madness, to the final, despondent, deliberately repetitious chorus and lilting heart-beat fade-out of "Eclipse," the musical composition and lyrics of the album's nine tracks deal either with madness or death, or the inextricable interaction of the two on human perception.

B. The Inevitability Of Mortality

DSOTM's portentous repetition of its various compositional elements in each of its songs is the album's signetary motif. Waters masterfully plies the methodical sweeps of his musical paintbrush to broadstroke-in his hypnotically-lilting bass riffs and subliminal chord shifts, his songs' mundanely cyclical, "day-to-day life process"-related subject matter, ambient, looping choruses, recurrent death & madness themes and drummer Nick Mason's pulsating, metronomic heart-beat, cash register, clock-tick and footstep sound effects, onto the nine track-segments of an auditory canvas that has neither a beginning or end, but merely fades into and back out of the listener's consciousness like a lingering apprehension. Waters cleverly uses this motif, not only to provide the individual, song-related subjects a distinctive unifying and harmonizing common thread, but more significantly, a common thread that subtley and rather ingeniously enables the "underlying" background themes, (i.e., the madness-inducing futility of the human condition and the illusory moonbeams of security and permanence conferred by the hypnotic regularity of life's cyclical processes,) to dominate and thereby ridicule and trivialize the importance of the seemingly consequential subjects (i.e., "money," "success," "materialism," etc.,) on which each of the songs focus.

C. The Lunacy Of Day-To-Day Existence

The subdued steadiness, yet pervasive rhythmic resonance of Waters' hypnotic bass is set off by Richard Wright's improvisational, jazzy/space-y keyboards, which combine with lead guitarist David Gilmour's trademark "slide and echo guitar style" to weave eerie, half-improv/ half-chord cobwebs of melancholia that almost sting you with the ethereal sweetness and beauty of the hopelessness and isolation they convey. The desolate peals of "slide whistle"-like eerie, mournfulness sound like a combination of the strident, yet muted metallic underwater-echo of communicating whales morphed into the distant wail of a grief-stricken spirit's siren-song. The effect is most noticeable in "Breathe," "Us And Them" and "Braindamaged," where it musically "doubles" the alienation and helplessness conveyed by the lyrics.

IV. CONCLUSION

DSOTM is not merely an excellent progressive-rock composition; it's a musical standard-bearer by which all others of it's type are measured. The timelessness of its tragic themes insure its future relevance and popularity for decades to come. The proficiency and artistic acumen with which DSOTM addresses and modernizes its chosen theme: "the tragic futility of the human condition," makes this album to its artistic medium (i.e., music), what Shakespeare's treatment of madness and death in "Hamlet" is to its respective medium.

Considering the inescapable reality of the tragic themes symbolically represented in DSOTM by the moon in the final phase of its lunar cycle, and following its implications through to their logical progressions and inevitable conclusions, perhaps it is more miraculous that other attainees of literary greatness have been able to do so ~without~ enhancing the creative process with the regular and heavy consumption of recreational drugs.

Thank You For Reading,

The 29th_Candidate