One artist. Every album. Ten songs.
The Music of Pink Floyd
Shortly after listening to the entire discography of Abba, I was discussing the group with my father-in-law, Van. He liked my idea of picking an artist and going through their entire body of work, and he suggested we pick one to listen to together. I said I was up for anything.
I probably shouldn't have said that.
Pink Floyd is wild, psychedelic, and experimental - they are absolutely not the kind of band to listen to when you're sorting children's books in a Christian school library. While there were moments of light and beauty across the fifteen albums I listened to, many moments (particularly in the first two albums) reminded me of this quote by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters where a demon is discussing his taste in music:
Music and silence - how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell...no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise - Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile - Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.
To their credit, I believe that this was exactly what Pink Floyd were going for. Their music would drift from rage to madness to dreams to sounds of breakfast (no, seriously) and back to rage again. As they pushed onward, I found that their music became characterized by more structure, rhythm, and narrative focus - but even so, many of the rules of radio music are 100% ignored.
The Wall was definitely my favourite album of the bunch, mainly because of its narrative. The whole album creates a fictional character named "Pink Floyd" who in many ways represents the turmoil that the band itself was going through. It's a really interesting album both musically and lyrically - although it's also the home of lyrics so outrageously offensive I dare not even repeat them. The band takes shelter behind the fictionalization of the singer, but at the end of the day, they wrote some incredibly hateful lyrics.
There aren't many I'd recommend this group to. But at least I can say with confidence why that is.