Secrets of Life: Darkside of the Moon Part II

By Kanrei

Continuing with Dark Side of the Moon, the next section of songs should be looked at as a block rather than individual songs. They are Time, The Great Gig in the Sky, Money, Us and Them. These songs are the great destroyers of life. They are the things that can drive you mad. It is not the amount of each you have, but how obsessed you are with each and how much control you give to each.

Each song is about the pressures that these three themes in life bring. Time and The Great Gig in the Sky can be viewed as one song: Time, with its tale of wasting hours and shorter years and The Great Gig in the Sky, a reference to death.

The song Time is even set up musically to mimic how we waste our time. The song has a long and building musical introduction. It just about takes too long, like growing up, but then the song starts in its rock and roll glory and ends too soon, like adult life.

“Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

Wasting your childhood wanting to grow up only to grow up and find you wasted your childhood. The entire song was so obsessed with time that the singer is forced to stop singing so the song can end:

“The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.”

Money is obvious about its meaning. It deals with greed and the Biblical “The love of money is the root of all evil” concept. “Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie”. It is easy to condemn money, but those that do usually don’t need to worry about it however they lose their soul in the process.

“Money, it's a hit.
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit.
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.”

The obsession with money and possession leads into the next song; Us and Them. From the title, it is pretty obvious that this one is about the divisions we apply to ourselves and the pointless fights they bring. The “Us and Them” actually applies to the citizens as the “Us” and the governments as the “Them”.

“Us, and them
And after all we're only ordinary men.
Me, and you.
God only knows it's noz what we would choose to do.
Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
moved from side to side.”

IF left to our own devices, we would not know our enemies without “Them” pointing them out to us and we probably would not care. It is “Them” that profits from the divisions that “They” create.

"Black and blue
And who knows which is which and who is who.
Up and down.
But in the end it's only round and round.
Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
The poster bearer cried.
Listen son, said the man with the gun
There's room for you inside."

The ultimate price of these divisions is that we stop caring for “Us” once we become “Them”. As long as we have ours and we are ok, screw the new “Them”. We can justify it as collateral damage and live our lives with money and acceptance and nothing inside us and think we are good people.

"Down and out
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about.
With, without.
And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?
Out of the way, it's a busy day
I've got things on my mind.
For the want of the price of tea and a slice
The old man died."

The album focuses on one person for this string of songs. It is a person who has wasted his time, sold himself out for the promise of more money and joined “Them” to happily turn his back on “Us”. He never gets his money “But if you ask for a raise it's no surprise that they're giving none away” and he is at the end of his wasted life with nothing to show for it:

“So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”

He finds himself insane, missing his childhood, and dreaming of the life he could have had in the beginning of the final part of the saga, “Brain Damage”. The pressures of his wasted life, the daily news and wars being fought over pointless divisions, the life he could have had all push him to the breaking point. He is committed, has a lobotomy, and lives his final days in an insane asylum.

"The lunatic is in my head.
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane.
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.

It ends switching back to the general narrator speaking directly to the listener again, as with the first songs. Also, as with the first songs, the narrator is restating the theme of the album and of life, only in greater detail this time.

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come

Everything in your life is part of your life and not to be avoided. When you are old and at the end of your life, what you look back on is the result of all your choices and what things you put priority on.

“and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

Everything under the sun is in tune: life works out the way it is supposed to if you let it.
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon: even though you cannot see the end, you must have faith in the plan and not be distracted by time, money or divisions between man.

As you can see, this album is about how to live a happy life and avoid insanity by using the example of a person who made all the wrong choices in their life. I hope you enjoyed this and will future editions of the series. Please let me know how you feel about it. I look forward to it. Thanks for reading.