Sic Semper Tyrannis

Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd was also responsible for another revelation in my young life as music appreciator-the idea of instrumental music. If I’m not mistaken, my first “wow, this music doesn’t have words!” experience was with the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here. It’s another one of those albums that I came to realize was pretty widely regarded as a “classic.” But to my eight or nine-year old ears and mind, I may as well have had the only copy. It might as well have been the band playing for me only in that bedroom when I first heard the opening minutes of “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond.” The first song on the album, it faded in very slowly, as if it had been playing for all eternity and I was being blessed with a private performance.

Well, maybe I’m getting a little carried away, but as I said before- the idea of pure music for music’s sake, that was a pretty phenomenal kick in the pants for me. It was so mysterious! “Why,” I asked, as minutes passed with no vocals. "Why aren’t they saying something?”

I talk a lot about shifts in your aesthetics when presented with something new, something that doesn’t follow all of the rules you’ve just started to figure out. Well, I hadn’t developed any Piagetian connections in my little brain to assimilate this new idea. I didn’t know it at the time, but “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” forces a listener to ask some pretty big critical questions. What is a “song?” Does a song have to have singing? Is music any more or less valuable if it doesn’t have words?

At that time, I guess I was a miniature absolutist, because I decided from that point on, that instrumental music was superior to music with words. So, the parts of “Shine On I-IX” without singing were infinitely more enjoyable than those sullied by vocals. (Even though it’s been years and years since I’ve heard that album, I now think that the contrasts between the two types of music and how they are connected is much more interesting than the either/or discussion. For instance, I can still hear in my head the jarring shock when, after a long time of wordless atmospherics, a voice comes from out of nowhere, singing “Remember when you were young…” What?!? All that time going by, of uncertainty of what’s coming next, of trying to figure it all out, and here comes this voice, giving a simple command? That’s pretty messed-up.

Wish You Were Here, as an album, gives you a pretty nice mix of the long periods of instrumental gooey-ness and some actual traditional “songs,” like “Have a Cigar,” the incredibly creepy “Welcome to the Machine,” (even at my young age, I got the feeling they were singing about deep things I’d never understand), and of course, the title song-which is fairly simple, but is one of the more beautiful songs in their catalog, I believe. Again, it’s the Gilmour voice, this time sounding sort of resigned.

Through the rest of my childhood and into high school I came to really revere the rest of the music of Pink Floyd. In fact, one of the coolest moments of my sophomore year of high school was getting to go see the Roger Waters-less version of the band in Dallas with Mark. It was one of those rare, independent-feeling moments as I was allowed to skip school and get on an airplane by myself into a big wide world for the approximately 45 minute flight to the biggest city I had ever seen. I remember keeping my suitcase under my seat because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with it and I remember the lady sitting next to me, giving me a very pleasant, understanding look when I stammered out to her, where I was going and what I was doing.

Right around the same time as I discovered…No. Right around the time I was discovered by Wish You Were Here, Mark showed me the most recent Floyd album- A Momentary Lapse of Reason, another soundtrack to my childhood. That album is a perfect gray, rainy-day album. Recounting all of this makes me wonder whether I can blame Pink Floyd for my naturally melancholy disposition. To be exposed to all of that heaviness at such a young age….well, it can’t be good. Did those bastards rob me of life? It’s like the beginning of High Fidelity. Did I listen to the rock n’ roll because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the rock n’ roll?

posted by Mike @ 4:46 PM