Pink Floyd Meaning

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On March 1, 1973, Pink Floyd released what some consider their best and most famous album, “The Dark Side of the Moon.” The album holds the record for time spent on the Billboard Top 200 albums with a total of 861 non-successive weeks, (Billboard) and includes prominent songs such as “Time,” “Money,” and “The Great Gig in the Sky.” It is characterized by the cover, which shows a prism separating a strand of light into a rainbow over a black background. When the album was released, the image impacted the music’s success by gaining the attention and support of a broader audience. In the recent year of 2011, the album cover proved itself once more when it was ranked the number two album cover of all time by the readers of “Rolling Stone.” …show more content…

Pink Floyd’s cynical lyrics and music suggested that they wanted to educate their audience on the atrocities of the world. “Money,” the fifth track on “The Dark Side of the Moon,” contains the lyrics “Money, so they say/ is the root of all evil today/ but if you ask for a rise it's no surprise that they're giving none away.” These lyrics condemn the skewed, over-prioritization of money in society and reveal the band’s discontent with a negative trait of humanity. “Time,” the third track on the album, says “You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today/ and then one day you find ten years have got behind you.” These lyrics remind the audience that life is short and procrastinating could be detrimental to your dreams and goals. Pink Floyd criticizes the way the world is and tells listeners that they have a limited time to change said injustices within the world. The ideas that the music on “The Dark Side of the Moon” express are radical and rebellious, and they inspire listeners to attempt to amend the wrongs of …show more content…

The image imitates Issac Newton’s work, where he directed a beam of light through a glass prism to analyze the rainbow that came from the other side. This experiment has all the main aspects of the Pink Floyd album: a light beam, a prism and a rainbow. Pink Floyd imitated the famous experiment by recreating an image of it and placing it over a black background. The light over the dark background is another reference to science on the album cover. The light, prism and rainbow over vast darkness is reminiscent of stars in the night sky and space. The twenty century was a time of space exploration and arms races, where man was delving into celestial discoveries with events like satellite launchings and moon landings. Consequently, the dark background with light over it is also associated with space exploration and science. These scientific allusions connect Pink Floyd to science, and a consequence of that connection is a link to the youth in the science versus religion

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