’’The Dark Side of the Moon’’ is a convincing musical argument by Roger Waters that some individuals can attain literary greatness despite ’’handicapping’’ the creative process with a heavy and regular consumption of recreational drugs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In like fashion, the album’s nine tracks either deal with madness or death, or the inextricable interaction of the two on human perception. The proficiency and artistic excellence with which it does so, 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 above, and following its implications 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.
© 1999 Jim Scileppi (All Rights Reserved)