Dark Side Turning 50 Next Year

[theaussiefloydian]

So, as is probably already pretty well obvious, on 1 March next year The Dark Side of the Moon will be 50 years old.
Which is frankly astonishing to me at least. I'm a reasonably new Pink Floyd fan (discovered them in high school in 2013, been in love ever since), so it astounds me that this album could be as far in the past as that.
However, that's not the point of this post. The point is for the 50th anniversary, I'm working on a video essay for my YouTube channel to break down what makes this album particularly special 50 years on, and why it's still the giant it is today. I have some ideas on how to approach this essay (I really badly want to write and edit it to sync up with the full album for no other reason than I can), but I am in need of input beyond my own personal feelings.
So, my fellow Floydians: 50 years on, what does Dark Side mean to you, and why do you think it's still the pop culture titan that it is?

[Jimi Dean Barrett]

People maybe associated Prog with long songs. So a series of shorter songs. Longer than most Pop songs. But shorter than most Prog songs.
It's their most user friendly album? Although it shares some sounds with Obscured By Clouds. Dark Side has more of an argument that gets put across with more gravity than OBC.
The way further arguments got across with the band became more jaded.
The last non-cynical album from the Roger era Floyd?

[mosespa]

I had never heard of Pink Floyd or any of their music (so I would have thought until I got WAY into them and discovered that I'd heard some instrumental passages during television broadcasts, but I digress,) until late 1979/early 1980 and that was because of ABITW2. I was nine years old and already had the beginnings of an album collection with the likes of Kiss, The Beatles, Styx and Foreigner in it. One of my best friends was named Kevin and his older brothers were in the habit of bringing really cool albums home "from their school library" that would introduce us to things like The Cars and Rush.

And "The Dark Side Of The Moon" by that Pink Floyd guy who sang that song yelling at teachers to leave the kids alone.

Kevin called me one day to tell me that I just HAD to come over that weekend to hear this other album by that Pink Floyd guy with the song about a lunatic on the grass and a creepy laugh after the lunatic gets in his head. Although I wouldn't see it until it aired on late-night tv in 1981, I was aware of a then-new film called "Phantasm" which featured a silver orb drilling into a guy's skull, so this was another reason for Kevin and me to talk about weird things going into someone's head.

We had a strange childhood. *shrug*

That same weekend, his brothers had also obtained copies of "2112" and "All The World's A Stage" by Rush, so I learned about "concept album" and "rock opera" in short order. Ever since that weekend well over forty years ago, whenever I would make a new acquaintance, I would always inquire as to whether or not they'd ever heard Dark Side. These days, it almost seems to be a rite-of-passage; I'd almost be willing to wager that anyone who has been a teenager since 1997 probably first heard about it because of the whole Wizard Of Oz sync that someone they know did.

Or something like that, anyway. Once I read in the Schaffner book that there was a CD factory in Germany that was dedicated solely to making copies of Dark Side Of The Moon, I got the feeling that it had transcended being a mere album or even work-of-art. It had become a thing unto itself. It's a perfect album (though, oddly enough, not at all my favorite Pink Floyd album,) it does exactly everything it ought to do and inspired one of my favorite Futurama gags.

http://i.imgur.com/wxvs9UC.gif

[DarkSideFreak]

So much to say about the album... The lyrics are like an almost complete philosophical look at the world, but still with some of the vagueness that would disappear the more outwardly political Roger got in the years to come. The music is so cohesive, with the way the songs flow together creating a standard that's rarely been matched. The sound is lush and warm (we can thank Alan Parsons for sprinkling some of his magic onto the tapes). The additional musicians enhance the band's performance instead of detracting from it. The innovative use of sound effects and spoken word tapes.

The band having honed the whole piece on stage for a year before releasing it made it very well attuned to the attention span of the audience - it ebbs and flows in just the right way.

So much more I could say, but not right now.