{"id":6413,"date":"2026-03-15T01:15:48","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=6413"},"modified":"2026-04-13T16:54:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T21:54:50","slug":"pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon-is-a-little-like-puberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=6413","title":{"rendered":"Pink Floyd \u2014 The Dark Side Of The Moon Is A Little Like Puberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

100 Best Albums The Dark Side of the Moon is a little like puberty: Feel how you want about it, but you\u2019re gonna have to encounter it one way or another. Developed as a suite-like journey through the nature of human experience, the album not only set a new bar for rock music\u2019s ambitions, but it also proved that suite-like journeys through the nature of human experience could actually make their way to the marketplace\u2014a turn that helped reshape our understanding of what commercial music was and could be.<\/p>\n

If pop\u2014even in the post-Beatles era\u2014tended toward lightness and salability, Dark Side was dense and boldfaced; if pop was telescoped into bite sizes, Dark Side was shaped more like a novel or an opera, each track flowing into the next, bookended by that most nature-of-human-experience sounds, the heartbeat.<\/p>\n

Even compared to other rock albums of the time, Dark Side was a shift, forgoing the boozy extroversion of stuff like The Rolling Stones for something more interior, private, less fun but arguably more significant. In other words, if Led Zeppelin IV was something you could take out, Dark Side was strictly for going in. That the sound was even bigger and more dramatic than Zeppelin\u2019s only bolstered the band\u2019s philosophical point: What topography could be bigger and more dramatic than the human spirit?<\/p>\n

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Stream Now On Streamapse2.0<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/a> Image Courtesy Of Apple Services<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As much as the album marked a breakthrough, it was also part of a progression in which Floyd managed to join their shaggiest, most experimental phase (Atom Heart Mother, Meddle) with an emerging sense of clarity and critical edge, exploring big themes\u2014greed (\u201cMoney\u201d), madness (\u201cBrain Damage,\u201d \u201cEclipse\u201d), war, and societal fraction (\u201cUs and Them\u201d)\u2014with a concision that made the message easy to understand no matter how far out the music got. Drummer Nick Mason later noted that it was the first time they\u2019d felt good enough about their lyrics\u2014written this time entirely by Roger Waters\u2014to print them on the album sleeve.<\/p>\n

For one of the most prominent albums in rock history, Dark Side is interestingly light on rocking. The cool jazz of Rick Wright\u2019s electric piano, the well-documented collages of synthesizer and spoken word, the tactility of ambient music and dub\u2014even when the band opened up and let it rip (say, \u201cAny Colour You Like\u201d or the ecstatic wail of \u201cThe Great Gig in the Sky\u201d), the emphasis was more on texture and feel than the alchemy of musicians in a room.<\/p>\n

Yes, the album set a precedent for arty, post-psychedelic voyagers like OK Computer-era Radiohead and Tame Impala, but it also marked a moment when rock music fused fully with electronic sound, a hybrid still vibrant more than five decades on. The journey here was ancient, but the sound was from the future.<\/p>\n

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100 Best Albums The Dark Side of the Moon is a little like puberty: Feel how you want about it, but you\u2019re gonna have to encounter it one way or another. Developed as a suite-like journey through the nature of human experience, the album not only set a new bar for rock music\u2019s ambitions, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6417,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[921],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-streamapse-highlights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6418,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6413\/revisions\/6418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}