For the 50th
anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon there
have been a few pieces, of course. Contemporary
writing about the album can seem full of, well, contemporary bromides. Take the claim that “Money”
is a song written against capitalism.
The men in Pink Floyd wanted to become rich and famous and they surely
did, so does ambition or even avarice have to be a distinctly “capitalist”
disposition? That the article went on to
quote Roger Waters saying he took the “enormous risk of being truly banal about
a lot of it” might be a reminder we need that nobody keeps coming back to the
album as a listening experience because of the lyrics. It was Talking Heads who once intoned in liner
notes that lyrics are a trick to get people to listen to music longer.
Then
there’s this piece at The
Ringer.
…
Dark Side propelled Pink Floyd into mass
exposure because the band realized that theatricality isn’t a mannerism; it’s a
presentation. Dark
Side is fundamentally one long suite with musical motifs
repeating throughout (“Breathe (In the Air)” reappears in some form during
“Time” and “Any Colour You Like”). Hundreds of progressive-rock bands in the
1960s and ’70s tried to do something similar, but Pink Floyd could actually
break sections of its albums down into discrete pop songs that DJs could play
on the radio. And the band removed stylistic choices from its earlier albums
that might be unpleasant for conventional audiences: droning feedback, jazzy
noodling, and 25-minute songs.
But the band didn’t abandon any of
its ambition; it just redirected that ambition toward themes instead of song
structure. …
The band didn’t direct its
ambition toward song structure because the band had figured out how to structure
songs across multiple albums. What was
new was that the band was not just providing songs that had clear structures
song by song but they also used harmonic gestures and riffs across the songs in
a musically cohesive way. The author at
The Ringer manages to both get and not get this point, getting that riffs from the
first track recur across the album but then in the next paragraph writing as
though the band was not directing its ambition toward song structure. Note the previously cited article that quoted
Roger Waters saying he made the lyrics deliberately banal. You can have all the
“theme” in the world but music has to have musical organization.
But
there’s something else about the piece at The Ringer that seems off.
…
Fifty years
since its release on March 1, 1973, Dark Side (the album) poses conflicting, perhaps
irresolvable questions. Can you overlook the clichés of modern-day mass-market
entertainment about the meaning of life? Or do snobbery and dismissiveness
unnecessarily prevent skeptics from being able to take Dark Side at face value? Can’t you
just turn your brain off and rock out to Dark Side sometimes?
After all, Waters, who wrote the
lyrics to all the songs, was only 29 when Dark Side came out. The notion
that he possessed some unique knowledge of humankind and its existence at that
age is dubious. What Pink Floyd did possess, unquestionably, was a desire to
succeed. “We still had a common goal, which was to become rich and famous,”
Waters said at the beginning of the Classic Albums episode.
…
Maybe the legacy of The
Dark Side of the Moon is that there is no legacy; it’s just a
moment in time. And ultimately, you might create something that’s remembered
and loved by the whole world. But your life isn’t one moment; it’s an
accumulation of all the discrete parts of your life, most of all how you
treated the people who really mattered to you. And if one moment defines your whole
life, then perhaps you didn’t go through real emotional growth, which is simply
making a low-level, constant effort to not be a jerk.
…
Waters
was only 29, eh? T. S. Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at
the age of 27. John Lennon was 27 when Sgt. Pepper was released. John
Calvin was 27 years old when The Institutes of Christian Religion was first
published. Whether or not you like John
Calvin or his ideas the idea that someone could not have made a substantial
contribution to arts, culture, philosophy or theology by the age of 29 is
tendentious at best. Now maybe Roger
Waters was too apt to puerile overstatement and cliché to have accomplished much
as a lyricist but the bromide that no one can possess any unusual insight into
the human condition is a dubious proposition should mean that we hand wave away
any contributions from anyone under the age of ... what … 30? Such is contemporary journalism from time to
time that these dubious bromides are commonplace.
And the
legacy of an album that has charted longer than just about any other album In
history is “that there is no legacy” is even more dubious. Would we say that about Sgt. Pepper or
Revolver or Highway 61 Revisited?
Would we say that about another album that has a 50th
anniversary this year, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions? I admit I count both Dark Side of the Moon
and Innervisions as powerful, formative influences in my musical life.
Just as I can never un-hear “Great Gig in the Sky” I can’t un-hear that
astonishing synth break and Wonder’s singing on “Living for the City”. To say
an album has no legacy but is just a moment in time can be shown to be the
dubious bromide that it is by juxtaposing the contrast between “no legacy” and “just
a moment in time” for almost any other historically significant moment. When someone assassinated Archduke Franz
Ferdinand that was just a moment in time, it didn’t directly cause World War I. When Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on
two cities in Japan in the mid-20th century those were just moments
in time. Reductio ad absurdum, of
course, but reductio ad absurdum via “a moment in time” deserves a response
that works at its own absurd level.
I can’t
forget when I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man any more than I can
forget hearing Dark Side of the Moon. I
can’t forget the first time I heard Duke Ellington’s music not because I can
remember the exact setting but because Ellington’s Blanton-Webster recordings
were so riveting I have loved them for decades. Sure, you could say that there
are adolescent loves we outgrow and maybe Pink Floyd can and even should be one
of those, but to suggest it’s legacy is no legacy is the sort of bad faith
writing about pop culture I find tiresome in 2023 and would’ve found tiresome
in 1993.
There
is something to be said about how Pink Floyd’s success with their most famous
and accessible album came about not because they lost their ambition for form,
but because they finally mastered form in songwriting. Every song on the album is clear. An older friend I knew in my early college
years complained that Dark Side of the Moon was just a pop album, a good
pop album, but an album of pop songs nonetheless. Well, sure, Uncle Meat it is not! But there are reasons people keep listening
to Dark Side of the Moon while far fewer seem to be drawn to Yes or
other progressive rock bands.
By way
of one final tangent before I get into what I set out to do here, I want to
mention that even in classical music history there were complaints that there’s
such a thing as too many ideas. Haydn
complained in one of his letters that too many people crammed too many
otherwise good ideas into pieces of music; you couldn’t remember what you’d
heard and it could have no effect on your heart if you couldn’t remember what
you heard. As the late Richard Taruskin
put it (Haydn fan that he was, and, hey, I am, too), Haydn understood through a
lifetime of giving audiences what they wanted that you figure out how to give
them enough rather than too much. After
albums of cramming more ideas into songs than could lodge in the memories of
any but the most ardent fans, Pink Floyd made an album where the songs were leaner
and meaner, and each song could lodge in the memory and, more important, the
songs as a cycle lodged in the memory.
I
blogged about the album all the way back pm Saturday, March 24, 2007. I
proposed that in the CD listening experience the album can be understood as a
tryptich. The basis for that analysis
had nothing at all to do with the lyrics and everything to do with the
pervasiveness of the i-IV chord progression as an anchoring pattern across the
track listing. The i-IV progression
bookended the first three tracks. After
a contorted opening theme “Great Gig in the Sky” featured a Gminor 7 to C vamp. The next time the i-IV vamp appears is “Any
Color You Like”, which marked off the third part of the tryptich. Only music theory buffs would likely care about
such an abstruse way of interpreting the album but dorian is a symmetrical mode
and no chord change in rock evokes dorian more clearly than the i-IV vamp.
So now I’m
finally going to dig into that by pointing out that what is arguably the weirdest
single track on the whole album has a breath-takingly simple structure. I am referring to “Great Gig in the Sky”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPGv8L3a_sY
Section
A (00:01 to 01"07)
B
minor F major B flat major F 1st inversion
g minor
C major g minor C major
[the foreshadowing passage at 0:18 of what comes later)
F major
7 B flat major 7 E flat major 7 c minor 7 F major
B flat
major E flat major 7 B flat
Section
B (01:08 to 02:31)
Gm7 C
major (dominant 9?) vamp 9x with
transition tag at the 10th pass being 1/2 measure shifts of G minor to D flat
major, to G flat to B minor then
Section
A (02:32 to 3:36)
B
minor F major B flat major F 1st inversion
g minor
C major g minor C major
F major
7 B flat major 7 E flat major 7 c minor 7 F major
B flat
major E flat major 7
Section
B (03:37 to 4:44)
G minor
7 to C vamp that repeats 5 times before the closing G minor 7th chord
You can
hear the rocking back and forth of the i-IV and variations of it throughout the
song even if you don’t know all the theoretical stuff like the chord
changes. Chains of fourths are all over
the song. The initial B minor to F major chord change anticipated all the
emo-grunge sludge of the 1990s that I never warmed up to. Shostakovich did a minor tonic with a major
sharp fourth triad in String Quartet No. 7 so the initial piano gesture in “Great
Gig in the Sky” is not exactly unusual across all of Western music but it was
unique for a mainstream song on a mainstream release. Whether it was this “Great Gig in the Sky” or
“Living for the City” or any number of other songs early 1970s rock, pop and
soul had some significantly more complex harmonic progressions than the Axis of
Awesome I-V-vi-IV ad infinitum of post-1990 songwriting. This doesn’t necessarily mean nobody got
I-V-vi-IV to work. U2’s “With or Without
You” used it just fine and threw in statistical accumulation of texture to
create its drama. But the early 1970s
were a different era and punk and new wave and post-punk had not happened yet.
“Great
Gig in the Sky” sounded weird and mesmerizing to me when I heard it as a
teenager and it’s still eerie and ethereal decades later. What has struck me about so much writing about
the music is how little of it has been, well, about the music. It’s like nobody talked about how gentle the
voicings at the piano were for how wildly unstable and mercurial the opening
theme actually is. By the time Clare
Torry’s vocal kicks in about a minute after the start of the song on the G
minor 7 and C vamp the tonality of the song has been so unstable and
quicksilver her entrance has the power it has because here, at last, there’s a
stable G minor blues/gospel vamp we can hang on to that lets us know where we
are in the sonic landscape and then … all of a sudden, we’re abruptly thrown
out of that groove back into the weird chains of fourths (perfect or augmented)
beginning in B minor that never seems to settle on anything for long but closes
with that B flat and E flat and B flat “Amen” style Prinner that Robert
Gjerdingen has described as a staple in 18th century music. And just after that B flat is affirmed, the
band drops down to G minor again for the next cycle of vamps.
It's
one thing to write a bunch of words about Pink Floyd appealing to adolescents
and ask whether or not people just need to grow up without ever quite saying
so. It’s another thing to burrow into what’s actually going on in the music
itself to get a sense of what is appealing about it for people who love the
music. I think the case can and should
be made that Pinkfloyd had, by 1973, mastered a complex musical surface whose
foundation was built on the simplest and clearest possible formal
foundations. ABAB is how we can write it
out if we boiled it down to its simplest expression but that conveys absolutely
none of the psychedelic ambience of a song that’s part of an album that has
charted longer than just about any other album in history. “Great Gig in the Sky” may hold up best of
the songs in 2023 because there are no lyrics at all. Rock lyrics are, well, whether it’s Dark
Side of the Moon or Innervisions, the lyrics were not exactly why a
lot of us were listening to those albums. Cliché words can be more than offset
by “what just happened!?” in the music.
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