Pink Floyd: A Monolog

The music of Pink Floyd carries the disillusionment of a generation, the sadness and the secret hope. As that generation, my generation, passes into the portion of life where its numbers begin to dwindle, when the physician is called for more often than the vintner, when each winter is indeed a little colder, now is when the music of Pink Floyd is in fullest bouquet.

Intoxicated with the strength of youth we sipped a vintage forty years older than ourselves, and only now with the scars of age upon us can we fully appreciate why the melancholy sounds of Pink Floyd touched us as they did. For all the intervening years we have carried the warning Floyd wrapped in sound seductive, no matter how we might have publicly reviled the loathed and solemn wisdom therein.

For the most part we were the children of the wars, conceived by survivors honoring the ancient tradition of replacing a dead enemy with living children, baby boomers raised by rote in the shadow of our parents secret struggle to restore an innocence sacrificed in the cause of freedom. They, whose gallantry bought freedom for the world, they themselves were not to be free. I saw this in my father's face, in my mother's eyes, in the fear driven structures of their thoughts and beliefs. Long before Floyd put a voice and a tonality to my perception I knew. Death, frustrated by fortune or fate in his first attempt on my fathers life stalked him still, and this my father knew as well.

Perhaps he, a child of an older time when death knew fewer restrictions, perhaps he knew even before the kamikaze and submarines brought the point to acute focus. But we, we did not know. In the silence which surrounded such subjects we could only guess without knowledge. And so when we first heard Atom Heart Mother or Dark Side of the Moon there was a commonality between those exotic sounds and the feelings which seemed to somehow seep or flow or explode around our parents as they struggled to reconcile having survived that which claimed so very many others.

Pink Floyd is the music of the inevitable rendered into comfort rather than terror. It is the music of a final understanding to bridge the incarnations, a proceeding comprehension of life as a fleeting set of fantasies resolved to little more than tiny footnotes. It is a music which emulates the shift in perspective produced from introspection taken to the point of hallucination. Dime bag or Batman, Floyd is the anthem of realizing, soon enough or far too late, that we are  all as mortal as our parents.