Author: Lawrence English

Publisher: Algora Publishing

Published: 2021-05-01

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1628944420

Pink Floyd tapped into the deep roots people have in philosophy, psychology, religion, literature, and history, and their 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon continues to appeal to people after almost fifty years. This book explains how the album evokes and resonates with so many cultural chords in all of us. "More Than Music is a rigorous examination of one of the most enduring records of all time, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Analyzing the album from many different avenues, the book provides clear correlations of the music and lyrics to many aspects of human culture, from ancient times to the present. Each song is examined line by line to show how the album evokes and ties together themes from myriad philosophical, mythological, psychological, religious, historical, literary, and other cultural sources. The book shows how William James and Carl Jung, Ecclesiastes and Kierkegaard, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, Horace and Orwell, Jesus and Buddha, Beethoven and Strauss, William Blake and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Beatles and Gilbert and Sullivan resonate throughout The Dark Side of the Moon. They are among the most powerful sources of who we are and why. Coming to see how the album knits together so many diverse elements into a seamless whole, the interplay of many factors that make up society is illuminated. This book will give readers a new way of looking at how the factors of philosophy, religion, psychology, mythology, literature and poetry, history and politics derive meaning and depth from each other. Readers will never listen to The Dark Side of the Moon the same way, but they’ll never look at the underlying factors the same way again, either.