| "Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way…"
Wouldn’t say I was the greatest Pink Floyd fan ever. I first became aware of them during the great punk backlash against dinosaur rock in the mid-’70s, a somewhat negative introduction I now admit. And like all great prejudices, my rejection was all the easier to sustain by actually knowing nothing about the target of my scorn. Least of all, about that monolith of prog rock, Dark Side of the Moon.
But then, one day, something changed.
"Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way…"
I think it was my good friend Simon. He, too, may not be the greatest Floyd fan ever, but he does have an unusually large collection of their stuff. Well, of DSOTM to be precise. Two copies on vinyl and no fewer than four versions on CD. Probably got the eight-track, too. Anyway, Simon and I used to talk music down at the Ship on Saturday afternoons, and eventually I resolved to see for myself what drove this otherwise sane boy into trainspotting territory.
"Tired of lying in the sunshine and staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today"
Since then, I must have played DSOTM maybe 100 times or so. Thirty years past its initial release, this album has surely withstood any test of time applicable to pop music, by definition an ephemeral form of art. It doesn’t sound at all dated, while at the same time (and contradictorily) still summons up visions of the bleakness that was England in the early 1970s. Readers of Q magazine seem to agree, too, for they voted DSOTM as the 21st "greatest album ever" last January. Mind you, Madonna’s Ray of Light came in at number 7….
"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun…"
Yet when all is said and done, it’s just another album. Didn’t even get to No. 1 in the charts, for all its legendary longevity. What’s more, Pink Floyd actually lost much of the fortune garnered through sales of DSOTM after their financial advisors poured its profits prematurely into skateboarding, a fad whose time had yet to come.
Time. If DSOTM is a "great" album, then it’s due largely to a single song – "Time." Dismissed recently by Uncut magazine as "trite and portentous," I’d reply: yes, but that’s entirely the point! Life – the subject of this tune – is both trite and portentous, always has been. As Shakespeare himself concluded: "Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing."
Ah, but the bard took a full 38 words to get to the point. In "Time," Roger Waters employs the razor of economy to make much the same observation in just nine: "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way." And it’s that one line, with its sense of desolation and futility, that continues to haunt long after you finish playing the album.
"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
And shorter of breath and one day closer to death…"
But was Waters a latter-day Shakespeare or just a common thief? A century or so before DSOTM, American civil libertarian Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, in which appears the line, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Given Waters’s own political leanings, I assume he’d read Thoreau at some point, the solid student he was in the early ’60s. It’s not an outright steal, admittedly, but probably enough to convict.
Yet theft implies prior ownership, which in turn implies a linear sense of time. This is obvious, of course, for it reflects our everyday experience of time, flowing from the past through the present moment on towards the future. But is this how time actually works? And, perhaps more importantly, does time even exist?
"Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines…"
The existence of time is not a trivial matter. Indeed, it has perplexed the very best minds across the ages, from St. Augustine in the 4th century to present-day Stephen Hawking. For the former, time was all in the mind. Future and past have no objective reality, but exist only as expectation and remembrance. We thus experience the passage of time, but time itself is an illusion. Sixteen hundred years later, Hawking accepts St. Augustine’s "psychological" definition of time, but adds several more in his Brief History of Time. "We find ourselves in a bewildering world," he concludes. "What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?" No answers yet, just more questions.
And so it is with "Time." No answers, just questions, echoing the concerns of "great thinkers" down the ages. Not bad for a pop song dismissed as "trite and portentous."
"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say." |
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