My first encounter with Pink Floyd was in Libya in 1972, when I heard Ummagumma. I had never heard anything so strange or fascinating. The album combined live performances with experimental pieces in which each member of the band was given space to pursue his own musical ideas. I became an immediate devotee. (Pink Floyd)
Pink Floyd seemed able to give musical form to everything disquieting in modern life: surveillance, policing, war, commerce, education, madness, isolation and the pressure to conform. Sounds appeared and vanished like signals from another world—voices, footsteps, machinery, clocks, cash registers, helicopters, laughter and screams. Their albums did not merely contain songs. They created environments in which the listener experienced society as something closing around him.
For a time, The Wall had a particular hold on me because of its attack on education. Its central image is powerful: each humiliation, fear and injury becomes another brick in the barrier separating the individual from other people. The school and its brutal teachers form part of that wall. The album itself grew from Roger Waters’s vision of a wall between performer and audience, and its story was partly autobiographical. (Pink Floyd)
Yet I later became sickened by the Cockney chant declaring that children needed no education. What did they want instead? Were they to be left to wallow in ignorance, appetite and selfish pleasure? The slogan attacked coercive schooling, but it could easily be heard as an attack on knowledge itself. It took me a long time to recognise how deeply I had been conditioned by that kind of thinking.
That recognition complicates any simple praise of Pink Floyd. They diagnosed the disease, but their diagnosis could itself become another form of conditioning. Rejection felt like freedom. Alienation felt like insight. To withdraw from authority, instruction and obligation could appear sufficient, although withdrawal alone creates nothing.
Across their work, particular fragments remain lodged in the mind. The Dogs of War presents organised violence as a business conducted by men whose currency is human flesh. “A New Machine” reduces consciousness to the imprisoned voice that says it has always been here, looking out from behind the eyes. Welcome to the Machine offers the final indictment of conformity: the system already knows the life prepared for the person entering it. The welcome is also an enclosure.
The band’s history gave this darkness an uncomfortable human reality. Syd Barrett’s disintegration and departure remained a presence in their later work; David Gilmour joined during the final stage of Barrett’s membership, and Wish You Were Here later became partly an elegy for the absent founder. (archive.pinkfloyd.com) Their music combined madness, estrangement and social criticism with consummate musicianship, especially Gilmour’s guitar playing, and with increasingly spectacular visual performance. The result was bleakness made beautiful.
Pink Floyd were not alone. Peter Gabriel explored similar territories, and David Gilmour’s later work retained something of the same melancholy grandeur. But Pink Floyd offered the most comprehensive diagnosis. Their oeuvre seems to contain almost every symptom of societal sickness: war, money, authority, surveillance, insanity, loneliness, mass entertainment and the conversion of rebellion into merchandise.
Yet they offered no cure.
The problem was thrown back at the listener. One could recognise the machinery, feel disgusted by it, and still remain entirely inside it. The music could become an accompaniment to escape rather than a summons to action. Psychedelic drugs and the promise of expanded consciousness offered another route out, but not necessarily a way of living more truthfully or responsibly.
Nor did the band stand outside the system it condemned. Pink Floyd attracted enormous audiences, wealth and adulation. Their criticism of the entertainment machine became one of its most successful products. The spectacle grew larger; the light shows more elaborate; the crowds more numerous. The machine proved capable of selling even its own indictment.
That does not invalidate the music. It sharpens its meaning. Pink Floyd expressed the unease of people who still carried inherited moral expectations but no longer trusted the institutions that had transmitted them. They knew that something was profoundly wrong, yet could not name a credible alternative.
The Romantics had at least found temporary solace in nature. Pink Floyd found almost nothing beyond the walls: only absence, darkness, madness and the bleak knowledge that the machinery continued.
Pink Floyd’s music reached millions through its beauty and atmosphere; its words, for those who attended to them, gave voice to a profound despair about modern society.
