What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.ĭown well trodden corridors into the valley of steel. Consider these lines from “Sheep,” as terrifying as any late Medieval judgement scene, and more effective for an age that may not believe in hell but has seen the slaughterhouses:
Not all of the Orwell overlay works so well, but when it does, it does so with devastating force. There may be no sharper an antithesis to “When I’m 64.” The image is made all the more devastating by the homicidal paranoia surrounding it. You know it’s going to get harder, and harder, and harder as youĪnd in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south,
You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder. “ Dogs,” above, was once a sardonic rant called “You’ve Gotta Be Crazy,” and one of its bleakest stanzas survives from that earlier track: Waters insisted on the literary conceit, against Gilmour’s objections, but the themes had already been very much on his mind. Most of the songs began their lives as a rough collection that came together after Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Occasionally glancing up through the rain. We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain The opener, “Pigs on the Wing (Part One)” (top), an urgent acoustic strummer that gets picked up at the end of the album in a strangely upbeat reprise, sets a dystopian tone with images that may now seem old hat (bear in mind Animals debuted five years before Blade Runner). Orwell showed the effects of “undemocratic structures” by reducing individuals to animal types, and so does Waters, simplifying the classes further into three (and leaving out humans altogether): the ruling pigs, praetorian and aspiring capitalist dogs, and the sheep, the mindless masses. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and coverteth me to lamb cutlets.” “Sheep,” for example, contains a modified version of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd. Musical and thematic similarities abound: epic, booming, doomy songs with lyrics completely uninterested in charming their listeners. 1977’s Animals especially reminds me of nothing so much as an album by Megadeth or Mastodon. Pink Floyd seemed determined to do precisely the opposite, setting a template for entire genres of metal to follow.
Indeed, “there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no dragons-and-warlocks-themed prog-rock epics,” writes Jody Rosen at Slate, “had the Beatles not decided to don epaulets for their lark of an album cover and impersonate a vaudeville band.”īut where The Beatles’ loose conceptual masterpieces had their stormy and sad moments, they generally kept things chipper on albums like Sgt. Pink Floyd will always be known for their massively successful concept albums, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ tense, and personally explosive, dynamic on albums like Dark Side of the Moonseems reminiscent of another masterful songwriting duo known for rock high concepts.