~music Listening Club 23 - Dark Side of the Moon
Welcome to the 23rd week, it had to come eventually...another classic record discussion: The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd! Posting a little early since I'll be busy celebrating Thanksgiving, have a great day everyone.
The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973 by Harvest Records. It built on ideas explored in Pink Floyd's earlier recordings and performances, but without the extended instrumentals that characterised their earlier work. Its themes explore conflict, greed, time, and mental illness, the latter partly inspired by the deteriorating health of founding member Syd Barrett, who left in 1968.
Developed during live performances, Pink Floyd premiered an early version of The Dark Side of the Moon several months before recording began. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios in London. The group used advanced recording techniques at the time, including multitrack recording and tape loops; analogue synthesizers are prominent, and snippets from interviews with Pink Floyd's road crew and others provide philosophical quotations. Engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for many sonic aspects and the recruitment of singer Clare Torry, who appears on one track. The iconic sleeve was designed by Storm Thorgerson; following keyboardist Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design, it depicts a prism spectrum, representing the band's lighting and the record's themes.
The Dark Side of the Moon produced two singles: "Money" and "Us and Them". The album topped the Billboard chart for a week, and remained on the chart for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988. Following a change in how Billboard counts sales in 2009, it re-entered the chart and has since appeared for over 900 weeks. With estimated sales of over 45 million, it is Pink Floyd's bestselling album and one of the bestselling worldwide. It has been remastered and rereleased several times, and covered in its entirety by several acts. It is regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time.
Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with The Dark Side of the Moon! Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!
If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on most platforms here.
Rather than get an obscure record this week, I'd love to hear from you in responses to this comment!
DSotM has been my favorite album since I first listened to it, and has introduced me to world of new music that I never would have discovered otherwise. I listen to the album to completion at least once every couple weeks, and always find myself hearing new things.
If I had to pick two favorite songs, I'd have to go with Time (which is my all-time favorite song), and Us and Them.
I think its a remarkable album, especially given how ahead of its time it was.
That said, I don't think it's aged well, and I think its popularity is mostly a self fulfilling prophecy on-loop at this point.
Its themes are wince-inducingly surface, by covering all 'deep' topics in one blanket-throw, it becomes an album about almost nothing at all. There's a song about time called 'Time' that starts with clocks and explores how time passes and you can't get it back, and there's a song about money called 'Money' that starts with cash machines and explores how too much money makes you evil. That doesn't really sell the 'genius' to me that gets touted so often.
I think for a lot of people its that perfect gateway album that demonstrates how an album can be a cohesive experience, and that music can be more than just rhythm and melody. It certainly was for me.
I'm not the Floyd fan I used to be, but I much prefer the looser, more improvisational sound of Wish You Were Here, that doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, and doesn't sound like young men trying very hard to impress.
Let's talk format. The listening club has had some great responses as of late, but it's still been running rather slowly. I've heard from some users that they're listening to the records but not participating in the discussion.
What do you think should be changed? This is naturally going to be a niche project on a site like this, but I wonder if there's any improvements bouncing around in anyone's head?
Two things come to mind for me anyway.
First, meh on the 'classics' - is there seriously anyone here who hasn't already listened to this album, and do we seriously expect anyone to write anything that's not already been written about it before a hundred times? I'd rather explore new styles, new artists, strange side projects, anything at all as long as it's different/interesting and something that most of us haven't heard before. I think the thread would have more value if people looked at it as also being a source of new stuff to listen to.
Second, perhaps more than one album at a time - to give people a spectrum of styles. Not everyone is into every style, so lots of people will end up taking a pass on any given record. It might be more interesting to do this like /r/listentous of old - one catchy, one popular, one obscure, or something like that. We might also do multiple albums from the same genre as a sort of 'intro to reggae/hip-hop/whatever' listening club - theme weeks.
Mostly though, these threads take time to grow. As more cratediggers show up on Tildes they'll get busier. Once we have invite links, I can think of a couple subreddits that could... well, probably quadruple the activity level in a day. ;)
I get where you're coming from on the classics, but I saw it as a bit of a compromise when I started this to switch off. I would love for this to be just a place for obscure things but I have a hard time seeing the answer being going for things with narrower appeal. Anyway, the problem with that goes down as time goes on. There's only so many all-time classics, and even less of those are universally known in a community like this. Any shift needs to keep some grounding in well-regarded work, I think.
I think you're right on theme weeks and mixing records with different appeals, though. Maybe having multiple series that alternate like shifting between parts of intro series to different genres by week. Unless someone has better ideas, I think I'll start putting together something like that myself and in the next thread put out a call for others to do so if they want to preach the gospel of their favorite genre or scene or theme or whatever.
Thanks for the feedback!
Well, try the listentous method - one album that's popular (a classic), one that's obscure (new/unusual), and one that's - well, probably something random every week, maybe taken from the past week's discussions. No reason we can't have the best of all worlds here. ;)
The 'classics' threads have actually consistently gotten more comments than the new album ones, probably because those who have listened to them already can feel confortable commenting even if they didn't listen to it recently. And while I can't speak for everyone, I definitely have not listened to most of the classics that Whom has chosen (including this one), at least in their entirety before. However I am not, and have never really been a "full album" listening sort of person so I may be the odd one out there. And I have also enjoyed reading (and making) comments on both the classics and new albums topics alike so would rather not see either go away.
I do like the idea of multiple albums per week though, just to give people more options and hopefully draw more people into the club by doing so. However, it could also potentially be scaled back to just a select few songs from the album so listening to them all isn't quite so daunting? I have to admit that sometimes I find it hard to generate the motivation required to listen to an entire album, even with a week to do so and even with wanting the music listening club to succeed.
As to activity, ~music seems to have the lowest comment activity (and votes) on the site by far... and even on reddit that often holds true as music subreddits pretty consistently underperform with regards to votes and comments compared to the views that links in them achieve as well. It seems almost everyone likes listening to music but only a very, very small minority actually enjoy talking about it. Which makes me wonder if anyone has any ideas as to how we can potentially encourage more comments and less lurking in music related topics in general, not just listening club?
The lower activity levels are pretty normal for music discussion groups - and we've seen the drek that forms in high-activity music areas on reddit, where all anyone ever does is argue about which Kanye release this year is the best. Frankly I think that's the result of just subbing everyone on the site to /r/music without them indicating an interest in it. We shouldn't have that problem here since there won't be any auto-subscriptions once the place is bigger.
Part of the problem on reddit is that all the genres and people who love them ran off into their little corners and they don't communicate with each other at all. Even talking to the mod teams to get them to pitch in for the bestof is like pulling teeth - nobody wants to be bothered. Radd.it did a survey a couple years back and it was something like 10k music submissions per day across all groups - and like 1% of it was mainstream. It's just all isolated and invisible on reddit. With the bubble-up mechanics here the best of those should all find their way into ~music eventually, so I don't think we're in for the same low activity in the future. In fact ~music might end up so damn busy we have to do some clever inventing to manage the storm, that'll be a wonderful problem to have.
Some feedback from someone who rarely participates and doesn't really plan to. Not sure if this will help you in any way, but I decided that sharing won't hurt.
The main reason I don't participate is because I very rarely listen to a whole album. Firstly, I rarely have time for that. Secondly, for me 80-90% of any album is filler, with only one or two songs leaving a lasting impression. I can recall maybe three or four albums where I liked most of the songs. Thirdly, when I do want to listen to an album, it's because I already like two or three tracks from it, so just listening to random albums isn't “my style”.
I think there's a place for what you prefer, but there's never going to be a shortage of links to individual tracks and a better way to accommodate that might be big guides and stuff (which would be great, too). Both are valid, but discussing whole projects is the focus of what I'm doing here no matter what.
Thanks for the feedback, though. What you're saying does indicate a bit of a need for something else. Not everyone wants to listen to albums, and stray links are pretty uninviting with no way to distinguish between them. Someone really should take up doing something to accommodate other crowds.
An interesting format I've seen here once is “You post a track and people recommend similar tracks”. Not sure if this can be a weekly thing though.
It can. I was actually thinking of starting a thread like that soon. Just need to get the seed tracks together.
We had a dream in listentothis that never really made it to fruition. 10k music tracks a day (probably more) are being posted on reddit, and it's all lost in the noise. Taming that maelstrom and turning it into wiki pages that are music charts tracking it all (by genre, new release, votes, artist popularity, and every other metric we can think of) - and then pushing those out to spotify as auto-updating playlists. Deezer can replicate it to every other platform except iTunes. That is how you make something epic out of the chaos of individual music tracks across hundreds of subreddits.
We definitely gotta do that here. With the plans for hoovering up metadata, and a better wiki, and the tags, Tildes is far better suited to make that stuff happen than reddit will ever be. I can't wait. :D
Heh. Back around 2004-ish, I have discovered a lot of good music I listen to today on Last.fm. Back then it was free in Russia. In case anyone reading doesn't know, the basic mechanics was that you listen to tracks, like or dislike them, and the magic machine recommends you new tracks. The great thing about Last.fm was that, unlike most recommendation engines, it actually worked. They later made this functionality a paid feature everywhere (except the US, the UK, and Germany), so I had to leave the site (I was a teen and had no personal finances). Every once in a while I am thinking of hacking together something similar, but with options (new vs old, more similar vs more random, etc). But the copyright owners would probably fuck me up.
I think the content here would eventually beat that, because it's all human powered chaos and there's no profit motive here to sour the milk long-term. When you ask a person for their recs they only remember the stuff that blew their hair back, so it's a natural quality filter.
We gotta find a way to tame the self-promo too. Banning it isn't the answer, but cultivating it is damn difficult because the signal to noise ratio is rather poor. It takes a crew of very dedicated cratediggers to sift it all for the gems. It'd be nice to get into a position to launch a few careers based on nothing but the quality of the music itself, without other concerns muddling the waters. Kind words and constructive criticism go a very long way for artists just starting out.