Review Summary: D is for Dad
For real, what happens when your Dad dies？
The music-loving internet is in the midst of a second adolescence. We're falling out of love with our parents' tastes again, and we're rebelling like teenagers. Albums that were passed down to us by that stubborn generation of rock-listeners are falling out of favour at a rate so fast that it'll make your Dad get back into the shed at 70 years of age and start building something- who f
ucking knows what, at his age- that might help to preserve rock music's most iconic names from a true golden-era that he had the privilege to witness firsthand.
The thing is, that's not all he's witnessed. He's witnessed generation after generation of people wearing that same f
ucking shirt from that same f
ucking band, an unceasing barrage of tidal waves after the colossal sh
itstorm that's been waving its prolapsed rectum around every inch of God's Green Earth since the first day of March in 1973AD.
What hasn't sunk in for most of us yet is that the palpable and disturbing dedication of that octogenerian alcoholic you call a Dad, red-faced in the workshop, seeming rather more inebriated than one suspects you should be while holding a skill saw, this drive of his comes from a place that is simply desperate to pass on some of the art that really
mattered. Maybe the reason that he's passed out on the sawhorse again with that still-lit cigarette dangling from booze-slackened lips, and, wait,
do you smell gasoline!？...maybe it's because he can't find an original way to tell you that the reputation
followed the art rather than preceded it. It almost seems redundant at this stage.
This hypothetical every-Dad character is antiquated and reductive and yadayadayada. I know, but follow me along this road laid of hypothetical brick, as our destination is the realisation that we're being immature, and lacking [MUSIC DISCUSSION TRIGGER WARNING] objectivity.
Oh f
uck, why did I say that？I don't mean that D Minor is objectively the best key, that pentatonic is objectively the best scale, or that phrasing is objectively the most valuable asset of a lead guitarist. What I
am saying is that this album has had one of the most objectively important impacts of any album ever. The factors behind this impact aren't limited to the sounds that emanate from speakers of wildly varying size, quality, and location (of both the spatial and temporal varieties) whenever any track(s) from
The Dark Side of the Moon start playing (again). The factors are myriad, and anybody that has a passing interest in the history of music should try to wrap their head around why somebody that doesn't even know that
Eclipse is not actually called
darksideofthemoon.mp3- which is really something in the age of Spotify- has that iconic album art plastered all over their chest on a faded black tee. Let me give you a clue as to why this is: an album is more than just the noise on the tracks.
You grew up as a child of the information age, therefore you learned things that your parents never learned when they were young. You carried this extra information throughout your development, and got to listen to an unbelievable variety of music. Aren't you special？Well, as it turns out, your parents
already had thoroughly-developed brains from their own uniquely formative experiences from before the internet happened. Perhaps they were a touch distrustful of the whole scope-widening ordeal- and rightly so- but now they've seen more Tiny Desk Concerts than you even knew existed on their Smart TV and they even have a Facebook page. They may not know Tor from Microsoft Edge, but they're seeing what's happening behind the curtain, here, and we need to think about what that means. There's even a chance that your Dad has interacted with some of the same anonymous digital peers that you've engaged with in heated forum-debates over the years; mere text-versions of people, devoid of expression save for what can be achieved with black text on a white page. He may now have seen the dynamic discussion, the deadly debate, the dreaded droning of the decidedly disastrous discourse that is the internet in the full-f
ucking-swing of an age of pervasive opinion-sharing. Obviously, I'm a hypocrite. I doubt your credentials are clean if you've read this far.
Maybe you don't think
The Dark Side of the Moon is the best Pink Floyd album. Maybe Pink Floyd were “just a phase” for you. Maybe it never clicked at all. Maybe it sound-f
ucked its way into your barely-developed brain (when you were young, stupid) without so much as a “How's your father？” before piercing your cochlea and eventually Pavloving you into having a severe distrust of songs in 7/8. Go ahead and share what it is you don't like about
The Dark Side of the Moon, for it's as uniquely flawed as any other album that's ever existed. Just keep in mind that as we fritter and waste our hours in an offhand way with our merry little debates in cute little corners of the internet, tomorrow yet another person is going to be sitting with their jaw slack after having heard this album for the first time. Also keep in mind that the next time you see your own personal Pops a few wines deep, arms raised in the air with his head tilted back letting the final notes of
Eclipse wash over his body, that it may be the last time you witness that happen. So when you see that almost post-coital bliss pass across his face as the album winds to a close, ask yourself why you would share any sort of venomous, contrarian opinion that might detract another new listener from experiencing that same feeling, a-and...wait a second. Doesn't that same noise play at the start of the album？
