This is a ‘special’ bonus episode taken from our Wednesday series that is now available for our ‘How Music Changed’ series, as a website-only event, featuring our coverage of the Pink Floyd album “Animals.” Enjoy!!

I’m going to open this short rant by stating that I genuinely consider myself a fan of Pink Floyd, but saying such, it’s very hard to discern exactly what I mean when I say I’m a fan. They have changed so drastically from their early roots (which I love undisputedly) until their ‘classic rock’ phase, when it’s significantly harder for me to rally behind everything that the band does. Intrinsically, I am aware that “Dark Side of the Moon” deserves to be recognized as one of the best albums of all time, bar none, and the albums surrounding it (particularly after) are also great, but lacking in the intensely produced focus of that particular album. I know that “Animals” is a creation that could have come from no one else except for Pink Floyd, but that doesn’t mean that I feel the need to present it as one of the best albums of all time…and yet, I do.

Who else could prove to be as intensely immersed in their sociological statements about the uselessness of human behavior as Pink Floyd? And with “Animals”, they reduce humanity to something even more painfully descriptive of our stupidity than George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, and yet we listen to this for the fun of it?

Yup. No other band (least of all a band that might rate as the most popular band in the world at this point in time) dared to go this far with a critical thesis about the stupidity of humanity. The bottom line is that we know we deserve the criticism, and so, we keep listening and we accept their painfully obvious observations of our stupidity, told to us with music that somehow leaves us with a positive impression?

Human beings really ARE stupid.

Feature Tracks:

Pigs on the Wing (Part 1)

Dogs

Pigs (Three Different Ones)

Sheep

Pigs on the Wing (Part 2)