1973: Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon
By Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
Last week I attached a gif from the 1937 Snow White to one of my students’ essays. In it, the eponymous heroine is surrounded by menacing yellow eyes and running through a forest in perpetuity. The text along the bottom reads: Lord! The male gaze!
The essay was submitted as part of a professional writing course with a focus on “nonfictional narratives,” which means I bury the students in reading while shouting things like, What you notice is important! and, Capitalism is the devil! The whole class—at least, those who are attending—knows I am writing this essay, or rather, that my pitch has been accepted.
This is my eighth year teaching college, and it’s the first semester that I’ve felt old instead of worried that my students will realize the difference between us is only a few years of bad decisions. I am not sure what has tipped me over this precipice.
This class has a shared Spotify playlist that I let loose when we’re doing writing assignments, and when we were first compiling it, I learned that a student had just started listening to Nirvana. I applauded as if he cared about my opinion. Later, he added “Wish You Were Here” to the list, and when we were back in class I tried to explain the Dark Side of the Rainbow to their impassive faces, imploring, That thing where you, you know, put on The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz? What I wanted to say was, Have you done this? Is this still a thing that people do? but even though weed is decriminalized where we’re theoretically attending class, I can’t bring myself to ask the question I’m asking.
When I was fifteen I downloaded at least a third of Pink Floyd’s discography off Limewire because I’d pretended to understand a joke. The actually funny part about the situation is that my soon-to-be-boyfriend had wrongly described a sound as bells ringing, which meant I began my search with The Division Bell and alternately Googled and listened to so many hours of music before uneasily deciding that “Time” on The Dark Side of the Moon must have been what he was talking about. The track actually opens with the sound of chiming clocks.
It was very important to me that I was NoT lIkE tHe OtHeR gIrLs. I cultivated a personality that was both intense and aloof; not sweet but still highly attuned to the slightest shifts in a boy’s mood. John’s family was complicated, and its complications afforded us space to be reckless. We smoked cigarettes in the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his parents with the windows shut; ate ice cream in the bathtub and mushrooms at the small, public playground; watched The Wizard of Oz with the volume turned down and Pink Floyd as loud as it’d go on the record player. I understood that those same complications meant that John would sometimes be sad or angry and that during those times his feelings were to take precedence over everything else.
Our class meets at eight in the morning, and most students trickle in at the last possible moments verging on late—one minute, two minutes, three minutes after the hour. I feel like Michigan J. Frog in that yawning stretch of time. In a Zoom room of eventually-twenty faces, real casual conversation is impossible. Instead, I ad lib tired; I ad lib an obsession with my cat; I ad lib conspicuously old-person attempts to engage with popular culture. I feel obliged to offer up something of myself, even if only a performance, in exchange for the stories they’ll tell about their lives.
I am struck by the high proportion of students who are women, who are of Asian ethnicity, who are openly queer. Early on in the semester I offer, It’s clear I went through a long phase of dating thin white men who thought they had great taste in music. Its one of my many joke-not-jokes, and one of these women who might look like me replies, without any sarcasm or malice, It’s good to know that is an intergenerational experience. The following week, I suggest starting the collaborative playlist.
The Dark Side of the Moon was only the first in a long line of albums that I would learn by heart because I had faith in transitive properties and wanted one man or another to find me interesting. That’s also the word I would use to describe that album: interesting. The first track functions as an overture and in the remaining forty-fiveish minutes each sound effects’ repetition pushes on that rewards cluster of neurons, “The Great Gig in the Sky” is an objectively great soundtrack for slow, stoned, meaningful sex before the age of twenty, and “Brain Damage” is like a tiny world to slip into and hide from reality.
But that’s not the type of thing I’d say. The Dark Side of the Moon is both critically acclaimed and popular, and if I could pick only one album to broadly appeal to the type of man I found attractive when I was younger, this would be it. That was a whole thirty years after its release, and it has become no less popular in the passing decade, though it's likely those unfortunate men have grown up alongside me. It punted Pink Floyd onto the billboards, has sold more than 45 million copies, and is cited by Radiohead as an inspiration. A 2018 Rolling Stone article begins with the sentence, There are hit albums, and then there’s Dark Side of the Moon.
I used to feel best about work when I convinced students to become excited by exposition, but my favorite moments in class are now when the students are interacting with one another of their own volition. Two women spam each other with texts whenever one is unmuted. Each of their *ping* responses *ping* and *ping* questions *ping* are *ping* punctuated with sound. Another woman mentions that she has knitted a Harry Styles sweater, and a tiny chorus of screams appear in the public chat box. Because it is eight in the morning and we are more than a year into the pandemic, the joke-not-jokes are bleak: I’ve been awake since 10am yesterday and I’m only alive because of Bang. They also type things like, “Moana is a real banger,” and, “tbh that was cringe,” when I try to ask a question in workshop about how many people are familiar with the plot of said banger. I want to invite all of them to my house and make them coffee and feed them citrus fruits and breakfast pastries.
The Dark Side of the Moon is an album that I’d put on repeat if I wanted to get stoned and lie on the floor and have an intellectual experience of intense listening. Otherwise, it’s ambient noise. As I’ve gotten older and stopped pretending as much, I’ve learned that I like music that makes me feel things, that bypasses my ego’s morass of self-conscious intellectual circuitry and just goes right for the jugular. Sometimes, my jugular warrants Taylor Swift. While I’d love to laud myself as having done lots of hard emotional work to overcome how I’d bent to become more appealing and that I’ve learned lessons about sincerity, the truth is mostly that I am tired.
Every morning I ask my students a question about their lives: What’s a place you’ve always wanted to visit? A good movie you’ve seen recently? Your Essay 2 topic? I sometimes prod for details and they groan in response. The most recent one was vicious: What would you contribute to the Museum of Broken Relationships? After everyone answered, right as I was about to launch into my routine, a woman said, What would you contribute? and I was so surprised that she’d asked the question so directly after months of nothing that I said, “I’d have a whole wing,” and I laughed like it was one of the many joke-not-jokes, but I’d accidentally told them the truth and I think they all knew.
Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a senior features editor for The Rumpus and currently lives in the DC area. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs, was published by Burrow Press in June 2020 and has been longlisted for The Believer Book Awards.