For Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon , 45 Today, Critical Acclaim Pales in Comparison to Individual Impact

The Dark Side of the Moon begins with a pronouncement: “I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks,” Chris Adamson says on the opening track, “Speak to Me,” his words almost hidden beneath a wall of clashing sounds. Kick-starting a record with the voice of a roadie is an unexpected choice, but Pink Floyd’s iconic album, which turns 45 today, is celebrated in part for its commitment to its own madness. Experimental, ambiguous, and conceptual, it looms large as one of rock’s seminal statement pieces, but critical acclaim pales in comparison to its individual impact. A rite of passage for music lovers, everyone has their DSotM story; Erykah Badu was introduced to it by then-boyfriend André 3000 in the mid-’90s; in high school, Billy Corgan’s friend halted the car they were driving in until Corgan would listen to it all the way through. These days, Generation Z YouTubers upload videos of themselves listening for the first time, their faces alight with excitement as they absorb each song.

Pink Floyd entered my life during a period of rock prohibition. At 12, having been barred from metal, and the screeching guitar-heavy bands that dominated pre-grunge radio (Use Your Illusion being my personal choice), I sought out something in tune with my tastes that could float beneath the radar of my father’s strongly enforced musical ban. In my father’s mind, Mozart and Marvin Gaye were music, the sound of Sakara drums or Etta James’s soulful high notes all valid forms of expression, but Slash shredding was “noise.” Typing “nice rock songs” into Ask Jeeves during a rare moment of Internet access at my local library yielded an inkjet-printed list of albums that could be played without bursting an eardrum or incurring parental wrath. Discovered on a GeoCities website (replete with the then-customary flashing animations and comic sans font), it touted songs and albums that were necessary listening, along with short descriptions of which subgenres they fit into. Considering the suggestions safer than Axl Rose’s siren call, I aimed to subvert a rule I considered pointless.

In the days before streaming, or the prospect of an Internet strong enough to send song files over, discovering new music meant a trip to the record store. I trekked into Manhattan to the Virgin Megastore, armed with enough Christmas money to purchase four or five of the hundred albums listed. Though we lived on the cusp of the Long Island/Queens border, visits to the city were a rarity, and our time spent there was divvied up between the varied interests of multiple family members. I had a half-hour to get in, get out, and hurry back to the loitering SUV. With five floors, the store was a maze; listening stations adorned the walls for newer releases, but anything older than a few years meant sifting through the racks and buying based on previous knowledge, bravery, or a kind of sonic osmosis. Sure, you couldn’t hear the album beforehand, but you could check the cover art for clues, seek out stickers that bragged of chart positions, or classic status. The disc for Dark Side of the Moon came with none of this. The famous Storm Thorgerson–designed prism was the only signifier on the all-black case. It was so different from anything I owned. Admittedly, making a judgment based on packaging is a famously bad way to go about things, but in this case, it was enough to pull me in.

There are countless ways to listen to The Dark Side of the Moon; purists will inform you that only vinyl or a live show will do, while those looking for something trippy sync it up to The Wizard of Oz to test out urban legends; some fans watch at planetariums, with the night sky as a backdrop connecting lyrics to the vastness of space. My first experience was something humbler, “Us and Them” drowning out the sound of my neighbor’s dogs, my sisters playing Barbies, and my parents engaging in their constant tête-à-tête, the mundane sounds of my youth replaced by something mystic. The songs weren’t Mozart, but they were beautiful, melodic enough to pacify my parents. No thrashing was required of me, no pantomime of what I saw on Headbangers Ball. With the volume lowered, I listened closer.

When you’re young, every song can feel meant for you. For better or worse, it’s easy to latch on and think that musicians are tapping directly into your thoughts. Impressionable, and on the cusp of the clinical depression that would come to define my adult years, words like “You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way, kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way” channeled emotions I would spend the next few years trying—and failing—to articulate. Though not a part of the album’s construction, the struggles of founding member Syd Barrett, whose battle with schizophrenia and depression led to his departure from the group and eventual seclusion, present themselves within the final product. An outright tribute to Barrett would come later with 1975’s Wish You Were Here, but his demons inform the central themes of stress, mortality, and isolation. There’s a loneliness inherent to many of the tracks, a feeling that the authors are far from where they’d like to be in terms of location or situation, the sense that even rock stars get the blues.

As an uninitiated audience, I knew nothing of the backstory—a tale that conflicts depending on which member of the group is telling it—at the time, I could not tell you who David Gilmour or Roger Waters were, let alone what instruments they played, but none of that mattered. The lyrics were uncomplicated, the kinds of rhymes Waters would later call out as being “naive” and “adolescent.” (Gilmour later admitted some of the sonic complexity was meant to cover their simplicity.) Easy to understand and connect to, even when they were hidden beneath layers of harmonies and synthesizers, they spoke to me. Even without words, there was plenty to unpack, the jangle of change in the intro to “Money”; Clare Torry’s impassioned wails on “The Great Gig in the Sky” leading my sister to ask why I was playing “church music” at home. It all connected; I understood none of it and all of it. I kept listening, my experience building with each new bit of information I’d gathered filling in the puzzle with anecdotes and trivia, what little I knew of personalities of the men behind the music. Waters, cynical and passionate, became my favorite. Gilmour, full-lipped and watery-voiced, got his picture pinned to my wall next to Leonardo DiCaprio.

Don’t judge—I was 12, after all.

Though I’ve (mostly) outgrown the hero worship, and a slew of other albums have come into my life, The Dark Side of the Moon still occupies a special place in my heart and personal history. It still says something about sadness and stress, what it is to feel out of sorts—the journey through the prism and out the other side is one of reassurance and transformation, a message its members past and present have continued to hammer home. “The line ‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’ is me speaking to the listener,” Waters told the late rock journalist Karl Dallas. “[I’m] saying, ‘I know you have these bad feelings and impulses because I do, too, and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share with you the fact that I feel bad sometimes.’ ” When I’m in sore need of inspiration, or need to escape myself, I cue up “Time,” the chimes of Alan Parsons’s clocks at the start meaning more now that so much has passed between first listen and last. I no longer have to adhere to rules about what I can and cannot listen to, and the words I once thought so specific to my experience now feel split, divvied up among millions: some sad, some happy, some playing them on turntables or singing in the shower. And perhaps this is, ultimately, the biggest comfort of all—in knowing that even in the days when so much divides us, so much is still shared, that somewhere, out there, others are playing and replaying, turning the volume up so they can listen in deeper.