Last edited Mon Oct 17, 2016, 10:36 AM - Edit history (4)
Dark Side stayed on the Billboard Top LP charts for 741 consecutive weeks. Never seen before, or since. It reached people on a very deep level to keep a run like that going from '73 - '88. That's a tribute to Waters.
Cover art analysis for Wish You Were Here:
The 4 pics for the album art (jacket and sleeve, front and back) depict earth, fire, air, and water, all being warped in a way that depicts and promotes death worship. That's commentary from Waters, not advocacy, obviously.
Earth is the pic where the faceless suited businessman record exec walks down a sand dune surrounded by a desert, holding a transparent empty record album, while dessicated sand leaks out of a hole in the white framing matting below the photo. Dead earth, sterile soil.
Fire is the man shaking hands with the flaming record company businessman exec (deal with the devil) in the Warner Bros studio backlot, where the frame for the photo is scorched and burned. Burnt ash.
Air is the hot wind blowing a pink scarf with a nude woman hidden in it across the palm tree lined LA boulevard, the substitution of lust and seduction for love and physical intimacy, hot air for a cool breeze, and the photo's frame is warped and distorted by the hot wind. Hot dry sterile air.
Water is a combination of a pic of Mono Lake with Brueghel's Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, where he flew too high due to hubris, and the wax for his wings melted so he fell into the water and drowned; the water is being drained out, (Mono Lake was being drained for L.A., draining the water was super salinizing and killing the ecosystem,) to the point where it's about to become "obscene", because Icarus is upside down and the drainage will soon make the water level low enough to expose his crotch. The vital, life giving element is being leeched out, life is getting sapped, drained, dessicated. Water is gushing out of a hole that was punched in the white mat framing the picture. Leaving dead dry salted rock.
Empty, scorched, perverted, drained, warped, dessicated, dead.
It isn't just a complaint about the record industry. The central label on both sides of the album around the hole for the record player spindle, and the sticker on the clear plastic that sealed the album, depict a low tech stone hand shaking a high tech robotic metal hand, it's split into 4 parts, with earth, fire, air, and water segregated into those 4 equal parts, and the pyramids in the background.
The pyramids were death worship, they represent death worship. Egypt was a peak dominant empire culture, the apex of science and civilized control over nature, then. The rulers of the time centered their peak scientific technological and theological understandings around earth fire air and water elementals. The most powerful god like rulers, whose royal bloodlines came from the gods, feared death so much they had to build huge monuments to their dead selves and preserve their physical remains forever, with post-death magic, lethal curses in place to preserve them, with their household servants put to death in the tombs, their spouses and concubines put to death, with all the slaves killed in construction accidents to build these huge tombstones. That's the low tech stone hand. The high tech robotized computer hand is today's industrial society, shown by all the L.A. area album photo artwork.
Some lyrics from the album: you're gonna fly high, you're never gonna die. when you were young, you shown like the sun, now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. blown on the steel breeze. you think you can tell, heaven from hell, blue skies from pain, a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil. did they get you to trade, your heroes for ghosts, hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change, did you exchange, a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage. running over the same old ground, and how we found, the same old fears.
I've heard arguments made that Waters was talking to Barrett, that he was describing the Vietnam War and it's opposition, that he was indicting the music industry. But he combined them all together, and used the high tech robot hand to represent the machine that is today's industrial empire driven society, with pharaohs of its own. That's what's behind his dad's WWII death, Barrett's mental pain, Vietnam, soulless record industry, empty greed acquisitivism materialism, National Front, environmental destruction, and the ruling class.
When cassettes came around, the cover art dropped from 4 to 3 pics. I got a CD, and the cover art had dropped to 2 pics. The 4 pics are a set, and the jacket sticker and label on the record art are necessary, to understand the ideas.
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