Rock History week Part 5: Dark Side Of The Moon

Without question one if the most successful albums of all time, what was it about Dark Side of the Moon that resulted in such extraordinary success. Well it's something that has cropped up several times this week, when we looked at bowie we saw that his successes relied upon him reading the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and reflecting them in his new incarnations, but as the 60's became the 70's he neatly abandoned the rather clumsly attempts at donovan-eque folk music and adopted a more science fiction influenced look, combined with androgeny and sexual ambiguity. The abandonment of the hippy movement in 1969 by many in Britain and America due the seeming exceeses of the lifestyle and the feeling that the protest movement was peetering out again saw a departure by many artists from the counter culture and into areas such as country music. Dark Side of the Moon was a rejection of the heady social optimism of the mid 1960s and was a damning attack on mass society and culture. Songs like Money, Us and Them, and Time were collectively described by lead singer Roger Waters as 'An expression of political, philosophical and humanitarian empathy that we were desperate to get out.'
What does he mean by this? The album features five long continual pieces of music that each signify different life stages of human beings. The album concentrates on the idea of the futility of aspects of human existence, particularly life in modern consumerist society. The ever present possibility of alienation and madness is a clear inheritence from the post marxist thinkers and post freudians of the 1960s.

Perhaps the most successful song on the album, later referenced in the film version of The Wall is Money. Opening with the sound of cash registers and loose change, the first track on side two, "Money", mocks greed and consumerism using tongue-in-cheek lyrics and cash-related sound effects ("Money" has been the most commercially successful track from the album, with several cover versions produced by other bands).

The sequel to this album is, as everyone knows, OK Computer by Radiohead.