Why The Dark Side of the Moon is a Masterpiece
“The Dark Side of the Moon is a bit like puberty. At some point, whether you want to or not, you’re going to run into it.”
That quote from an Apple Music review perfectly sums up Pink Floyd’s masterpiece of music and legendary album, The Dark Side of the Moon. The album touched the hearts of millions of people, both Pink Floyd fans and random people who found the album through friends, family, or just the radio. The Dark Side of the Moon’s album cover is so widely recognizable that you probably passed someone wearing it on a shirt within the last week. The triangular prism of The Dark Side of the Moon has become synonymous with Pink Floyd themselves. But what makes The Dark Side of the Moon one of the best albums of all time? Does it still hold up almost 50 years later?
To speak of The Dark Side of the Moon, we need to discuss the band behind the album. Pink Floyd was a British Rock band that formed in 1964 with members Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright, and Syd Barrett. The band went through several awful names like “The Tea Set,” “T-Set,” and the like. Eventually settling on Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett started doing ridiculous amounts of LSD(a hallucinogenic drug for those somehow unfamiliar) and produced Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. For Pink Floyd’s second album, Syd brought in David Gilmour as a second set of guitars. After A Saucerful of Secrets was released, Syd’s mental state reached a critical breaking point, and the band dumped him in favor of Roger Waters as frontman. This context is important for understanding what influenced both Dark Side of the Moon and Pink Floyd as a band. After Syd’s departure, Roger Waters took over songwriting, and about five more albums were released; Dark Side of The Moon would begin production with a much more experienced Pink Floyd looking back on their musical career.
The Dark Side of the Moon expanded on previous Pink Floyd themes on a much greater scale. The open, drifting sound that is reminiscent of the vast expanses of space. A dark atmosphere that is full of ambient clinks, clangs, and the rush of the wind. The Dark Side of the Moon isn’t just an album, it’s an experience. This is only reinforced by the vocals of David Gilmour and Roger Waters. Waters wrote most of, if not all of, The Dark Side of the Moon, but Gilmour is what sells the experience. His vocals ranged from soothing in the song Breathe(In the air), to angry in Money, to the melancholic in Time. The vocals, backed by the themes of the inevitability of death in Breathe(In the Air), Time, and Great Gig in the Sky, the increasingly greedy society in Money, the mentality of war in Us and Them, and as a reflection on their fallen comrade Syd Barret’s madness in Brain Damage and Eclipse.
I can’t fully capture how incredible Dark Side of The Moon truly is, so I highly recommend that you go and listen to it for yourself. I would also recommend you wear headphones, sit in the dark, and do it all in one shot. I hope this gave you an insight into both The Dark Side of the Moon and Pink Floyd, and I once again highly recommend listening to this album.
