'Speak to Me': The Legacy of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon

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Russell Reising
Routledge, Oct 3, 2017 - Music - 272 pages
The endurance of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon on the Billboard Top 100 Chart is legendary, and its continuing sales and ongoing radio airplay ensure its inclusion on almost every conceivable list of rock's greatest albums. This collection of essays provides indispensable studies of the monumental 1973 album from a variety of musical, cultural, literary and social perspectives. The development and change of the songs is considered closely, from the earliest recordings through to the live, filmed performance at London's Earls Court in 1994. The band became almost synonymous with audio-visual innovations, and the performances of the album at live shows were spectacular moments of mass-culture although Roger Waters himself spoke out against such mass spectacles. The band's stage performances of the album serve to illustrate the multifaceted and complicated relationship between modern culture and technology. The album is therefore placed within the context of developments in late 1960s/early 1970s popular music, with particular focus on the use of a variety of segues between tracks which give the album a multidimensional unity that is lacking in Pink Floyd's later concept albums. Beginning with 'Breathe' and culminating in 'Eclipse', a tonal and motivic coherence unifies the structure of this modern song cycle. The album is also considered in the light of modern day 'tribute' bands, with a discussion of the social groups who have the strongest response to the music being elaborated alongside the status of mediated representations and their relation to the 'real' Pink Floyd.
 

Contents

Contributors biographical notes
12
The Floydian slip
18
a brief history of The Dark Side of the Moon
audiovisual stadium rock aesthetics in Pink Floyds
Pink Floyd classic rock and white masculinities
music myth and narrative structure in The Dark
the sound and structure of The Dark Side of
tracing tonal coherence in The Dark Side of the Moon
the enigma of The Great Gig in the Sky
the Pink Floyd
reading The Dark Side of the Moons philosophical
covering the dark side
the influence of The Dark Side of the Moon on the next generations
an interview with
an annotated bibliography of selected reviews
Works cited

modulating between misery and madness
antipsychiatry and The Dark Side of the Moon

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