Pink Floyd and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) pdf

By 1971, Pink Floyd had set the controls for the heart of philosophy. That year,

Adrian Maben made his extraordinary concert film, Pink Floyd at Pompeii. It begins with

the desolate, lonely strains of “Echoes” as Maben’s camera—impossibly high above the

ancient Roman amphitheatre at Pompeii—descends with almost imperceptible slowness

into the circular theatre of stone. The band, its truckloads of equipment, and miles of cables are set up in the middle of the enormous circle below.

Pink Floyd had just begun writing and recording Dark Side of the Moon and had

yet to be jolted by the international stardom that would propel them through the 1970s

and culminate in their second monster album, The Wall, in 1979. That’s why the setting

and venue could not be more perfect—or ironic. For this enormous stone amphitheatre is

a circular wall, built up long ago brick by brick, isolating Roger Waters, Nick Mason,

David Gilmour, and Rick Wright from the outside world. It was originally designed to

hold a live audience, of course. But there is none in this film. Pink Floyd simply

plays—to themselves, to each other, to a handful of sound technicians—with the

seriousness and concentration for which they were becoming famous. There is no public

performance, no on-stage banter, no corporate sponsorship, no advertising. Those who

might have come expecting to see Pink Floyd “in the flesh,” to get drunk, stoned, or

rowdy (or all three), might have felt that something was eluding them. But no audience

was present, so the film shows no trace of the slowly growing discord between Roger

Waters, in particular, and the rapidly growing audiences that Pink Floyd played to during

the rest of the 1970s.

By the end of the decade, things had turned around completely. The very first

song of The Wall has the album’s protagonist, Pink, interrogating a stadium-sized crowd

of inebriated teenagers:

So ya thought ya might like to go to the show.

To feel the warm thrill of confusion

That space cadet glow.

Tell me, is something eluding you, Sunshine? His anger culminated in 1977 during

a show in Montreal, Waters recalls in interviews. Noisy, disruptive fans so annoyed him

that he spit on them from the stage. He was appalled at his behavior, he admits, and

began to think seriously about how and why large audiences had become so disconnected

from the music they had paid to hear, and from the musicians they had come to see “in

the flesh.” Soon, he was toying with the concept of a rock band separated from its

audience by a huge brick wall. But even that idea did not assuage his sarcasm and

bitterness. Early drafts of Waters’s screenplay for the film version (released in 1982)

included military airplanes dive bombing the audience.1

Here in the ruins of Pompeii, however, Waters and the band play without a hint of

the frustration or bitterness that was to come. They are happy playing alone, behind their

wall, without any suggestion that this is some psychotic confinement or retreat from a

cruel, unbearable world. Those themes and messages had not yet become real and

pressing for Waters. The event Maben’s cameras capture is noncommerical, artistic, and

musical.

And philosophical. Pink Floyd seems natural and comfortable in this setting not

simply because they play so well or because the cameras glide around the band and the

open-air amphitheatre so elegantly. It is because the themes and ideas they had just begun

to explore musically on Meddle and Dark Side—such as time, death, madness, loss, and

empathy—are among those that philosophers of ancient Greece and Italy began to

scrutinize over two thousand years ago. Not far from the time and the place, that is,

where the volcano Vesuvius erupted to strip away all but the stone buildings of this once

bustling Italian village.......