Friday Reflection: For the Heart of the Sun

click the graphic to listen to the end of "Pigs"

Perhaps the first point we should make clear about this week's banner quote is that it's not about Bush or any other inhabitant of the presidential residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave (though it might as well be). In fact, Roger Waters was describing—or perhaps assaulting would be a more accurate term—Mary Whitehouse, a morality campaigner favored by the Margaret Thatcher government, that fish-n-chips neocon hegemony of the '80's.

Apparently, Mary was quite the tight little priss—think of her as the James Dobson/Brent Bozell of her day. Anti-gay, anti-violence, anti-sex, anti-liberal, anti-fun—anti-everything, in fact, that didn't come wrapped in moral shades of Hallmark card bland. She was, of course, quite effective in her shrill damnation of everything in the media or the arts that was sensual or at the mildest variance with her narrow view of family values. Unfortunately, her success encouraged a lot of copycat acts, right unto this day, in which we have Rush, Coulter, O'Reilly and the like stirring the most violent hatred against any movies, music, and media that offend them.

So Waters chose as one of the "three different kinds" of pigs, this Mary Whitehouse. Here's the complete verse, which closes the song:

Hey you, Whitehouse,
Ha ha charade you are.
You house proud town mouse,
Ha ha charade you are
You're trying to keep our feelings off the street.
You're nearly a real treat,
All tight lips and cold feet
And do you feel abused?

You gotta stem the evil tide,
And keep it all on the inside.
Mary you're nearly a treat,
Mary you're nearly a treat
But you're really a cry.

What follows this is one of the musical highlights of Animals: David Gilmour reminding us why they called it an "electric" guitar. "Pigs" concludes with a guitar solo of spine-tingling virtuosity. Gilmour's art illustrates a guiding principle of musicianship, which is well known among classical artists: if you'd like to be a great soloist, learn accompaniment first. Listen to Gilmour's lyrical, trickling notes during Dick Parry's saxophone solo in Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and you'll hear his eminent skill at accompaniment. Or check out the second part of Dogs, where he simply strums some brooding chords on the acoustic instrument, while the howling and barking of the dogs begins: it is one of the most simple and chilling moments in modern musical history. Unforgettable stuff from a pure artist of the guitar.

The Floyd were great not because they broke all the rules of successful music-making; but because they had learned them first. Every member of that band came to it as an accomplished artist; growing still, as all true artists always are, but whole and grounded in their technique. Thus, to write them off as an LSD-band or some electro-freak show that got by on gear and sound effects alone is to betray a very superficial understanding of their music, and of music in general. These guys were pros.

At one point during the interview segment of the Pompeii film, Waters grimly invites anyone who thinks they can do better to come on along and try: here's the gear, have a go. If you think just having the techno-goodies makes you an artist, then don't let the lack of them stop you. Perhaps it's a sarcastic point, but one that probably needed to be made.

The musicians of Pink Floyd weren't a pack of drugged-out little boys hacking at electronic toys; they were professionals who quietly worked at their art, perfected it, and in the process rewrote the history of music, leaving behind a body of work that will be heard and loved by generations still to be born.

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Pink Floyd: recordings

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
A Saucerful of Secrets
More
Ummagumma
Atom Heart Mother
Relics
Meddle
Obscured by Clouds
The Dark Side of the Moon
Animals
The Wall
Wish You Were Here
A Collection of Great Dance Songs
The Final Cut
Echoes


Pink Floyd on DVD

Live at Pompeii
Pulse
The Wall

Pink Floyd: concerts

Fillmore West, April, 1970

pigs_ending.m4a

Ticking Away: The Doomsday Clock

You got to be crazy, gotta have a real need
Gotta sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street
You got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking.

And after a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake
A certain look in the eye, and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You'll get the chance to put the knife in.

Dogs: if this music doesn't raise the hairs on your neck, best see if your head's still attached. It's one of the more moving, shattering songs that PF created over the course of their decade of creative maturity. Waters' metaphor is savagely poignant: the corporate hound, in a career of backstabbing, life-sucking, money-hungry depredation, finds that his blood has congealed--calcified with the weight of his accumulated crimes--and it drags him down to inner death, drowns him in the pool of his own poison.

Guitarist David Gilmour, one of the purest musicians of our era, is also at his heart-stopping, inspiring best on this track, in which he combines acoustic and electric sequences in music that raises Waters' verse to a level of sublimity that is rarely touched in modern music.

There are amazing discoveries to be made throughout this album: Gilmour performs further wonders in his solos on Pigs and Sheep, and even the tiny snippets that open and close the album (Pigs on the Wing) are moving in their irony--parodies of the top-40 love songs that were (and are) the radio rage while PF continued their practice of creating long, carefully constructed pieces of music that could be explored rather than merely enjoyed.

Animals, on the whole, is perhaps the last great collaboration of these outstanding artists (and I include Wright and Mason there, whose contributions throughout the PF era have been generally underestimated). True, there is some great music on The Wall, but by that time Waters and his runaway ego had taken over the band, and it was no more the seamless unit that changed the history of music with Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals.

Personally, I wish they'd included Dick Parry on the recording sessions (he did accompany the band on the Animals tour). Parry is the saxophonist whose sound had become so central to the PF aura in Dark Side and Wish You Were Here. Yet even without him, Animals is one of the high points in the entire history of modern recorded music.

Click the graphic above and listen to the first few minutes of Dogs, and then remember, there's more after that. When most musicians are wrapping up a song, the Floyd are just getting warm.

Yet in the context of the themes of our blog here, the reason we honor Pink Floyd is for their message as well as their artistry. Isn't it cool to hear a band sing of things other than a wounded heart and a hardened cock? Isn't it refreshing to hear musicians with a sense for politics and social awareness? Well, back when the Dixie Chicks were twinkles in their Daddies' eyes, the Floyd were out there, singing a relentless lyric of truth to power.

As the planet heats up, we move a few steps closer to nuclear winter. In a week where the UN informed us that over 34,000 innocents were murdered in Iraq last year; when a vile new term entered public discourse ("troop surge"); when further evidence was piled onto what we already know about the rush to planetary genocide known as global warming; then perhaps it is time we had more artists like Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright to inspire us, entertain us, and rigorously remind us of who we are and where we are headed. The scientists have done their best in their own way, and today they were joined by Stephen Hawking:

"Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion," Prof Hawking said. "But for good luck, we would all be dead.

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility once again to inform the public and advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces.

"We foresee great perils if governments and society do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and prevent further climate change."

When Pigs Fly (and Geek Wednesday)

Click the graphic to hear Roger Waters on Trump and Storm Thorgerson on flying pigs

Before we get to Geek Wednesday and another contribution from Nearly Redmond Nick, here's another slice of Floyd memorabilia for our Animals 30th Anniversary observance. This is an excerpt from drummer Nick Mason's book, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd:

Much of the material for Animals already existed in the form of songs that Roger had previously written. "Dogs" had been performed even before the Wish You Were Here album, on the Autumn 1974 tour of the UK, as a song called Gotta Be Crazy, and elements of Sheep had appeared on the same tour as Raving and Drooling. The music had thus been in gestation for well over a year and had benefited from some toughening up in front of the audiences on the tour.

Towards the end of recording, Roger created two pieces called Pigs On The Wing to open and close the album, designed to give the overall shape of the album a better dynamic and enhance the animal aspect of it.

My memory of this period is that I enjoyed making this album more than Wish You Were Here. There was some return to a group commitment, possibly because we felt that Britannia Row was our responsibility, and so we were more involved in making the studio and the recording a success. Given that it belonged to us, we really could spend as long as we wanted in the studio, and there was no extra cost involved in unlimited frames of snooker or billiards.

Some critics felt that the music on Animals was harder and tougher than anything else we had done. There were various reasons why that might have been so. There was certainly a workmanlike mood in the studio. We had never encouraged a stream of visitors to our previous recording sessions, but at Britannia Row, the lack of space meant there was really only room for the crew in the cockpit.

Any harder edge might also have been a subconscious reaction to accusations of "dinosaur rock" that were being thrown at bands like Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and ourselves. We were all aware of the arrival of punk -- even anyone who didn't listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols explosion in the media spotlight. Just in case we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching "I Hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt.

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Geek Wednesday

Geek Quote of the Week: Think those suits at Microsoft have a firm grip on reality? Well, check out what this guy has to say:

"We're really recognizing the fact that homes now (have) four or five PCs, an Xbox, music player, a Zune," Microsoft entertainment unit president Robbie Bach said...

When you come back from your home planet, Robbie, maybe you should check out what's happening down here.

This, of course, comes from the company that slaps a new skin onto an old warhorse like Office or IE and then pronounces it a revolutionary new product. Believe me, folks, I turn on IE 7 just about every evening, with the popup blocker at full bore; and I still get multiple adware popups within seconds of starting the miserable thing.

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...and when you lose control / you'll reap the harvest you have sown...

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Now just so you don't think I'm some sort of Mac drone who has nothing critical to say of Apple, check out their home page now: there are no computers there anymore. There's a phone that won't be sold until June, a TV box that won't be sold until next month, movies, and more TV commercials. In fact, they took the word "computer" out of their official company name!

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...and as the fear grows / the bad blood slows and turns to stone...

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I also have this story from NR Nick: Apple intends to charge folks who purchased their new computers a fee for 802.11n access! All right, Steve will need the money to pay those fines to the SEC (and maybe he'll need some bail cash too). But shit, I've already spent $1300 for my MacBook and the 802.11n card inside it—how much more will it cost me, Steve?

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...and it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around...

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So there you have it: wealth makes you both delusional (MS) and arrogant (Apple). Now do you wonder why we're spending this week talking about a record from a psychedelic rock band that sings of the brutal realities of a world filled with pigs and dogs and sheep?

Now finally, for what we had meant to feature on Geek Wednesday this week, until other things distracted us. Here's Nick on the future of IT in the enterprise:

DailyrEvolution 2.0

As we begin the new year, I want to know what my job is going to bring me. It's not that I don't care about anything else, but I need to see if I'm wandering down the right path. Wishing one day to be a CTO or CIO, I need to put on my Future Vision goggles every once in a while and evaluate the up and coming technologies. Here's NC Nick's take on IT in the Enterprise.

As you pore over all the industry rags, you see this 2.0 and that 2.0 and hear all the usual buzzwords, like SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, etc. I think it's unfortunate when really cool buzzwords get lumped in with buzzwords that mean crap. This whole everything-2.0 drives me nuts. Especially when it hides the real importance of the original version 2 - Web 2.0. This whole AJAX thing has some legs. I know you're saying to yourself, "Sure, it's cool stuff, but it'll never fly in the enterprise".

Well, that's where you'd be wrong. Try to name an enterprise app that doesn't have a Web 2.0 product (and a damn good one in most cases). Just take a look at Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 blog for a ton of companies delivering wonderful apps, and for prices that make most vendors look like crooks.

"Hey Nick, I'm hearing a lot about SOA? Should I jump on board?" Well, unless you're working at Ginormous Megacorp, Inc. I say "no". "But Nick! All the trade magazines think it's the best thing since sliced bread!" And my answer to that is, "Of course they do!" Have you seen the companies advertising in those rags? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun. It reads like a who's who of the software world. Let's hypothetically say Microsoft was giving me a free laptop to write nice things about a certain delayed operating system. Most likely, I would play nice and hope that MS came knocking when they were about to release another piece of crap software package. Of course, that would never happen.

When you have a company that can gain efficiencies by reusing tons of their software, adopt an SOA. If you have an army of programmers and need a library of services for business users to consume, adopt an SOA. Otherwise, stay nimble and just write decent code. You'll get your products out the door faster because you won't be developing all the overhead. This also means less money spent on development. Plus, you won't need all the expensive applications offered by Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun - have I completed the circle yet?

So this whole cost-savings/efficiencies thing brings me to SaaS - Software as a Service. We are definitely seeing a major shift towards this purchasing paradigm. No longer do we want to buy the next release of Office, with its 1.3GB footprint, and all its security holes, and its required $399 upgrades, and dependence on SharePoint Server in my infrastructure... I want to pay $9.99 a month and get just the functionality I want. And I want to stop paying when I stop using it. Oh, and it should fix itself so I don't have to do it. And I don't want to buy a server to host it on. And, umm, can it have a really cool interface? And is it OK if I never have to pay for an upgrade? OK, cool. It's pretty easy to see why everyone and their mother is looking at this pricing model as a viable alternative to traditional upfront purchase + maintenance fees as a way of life.

Take a look at Salesforce.com. They got it long before anyone else did, and it shows. It will continue to show, as they build out their infrastructure, and acquire more clients. Not to say things are perfect over there - they definitely need to tighten things on the security end, and work on their uptime - but they are the closest to an ideal SaaS company.

Lastly, lets not forget to mention the Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year - you! Congratulations! All those defamatory posts to MySpace, uploads of blackmail videos to YouTube and submissions of bookmarks to del.icio.us (not to mention your personal blog) make you incredibly important! Yes, yes, I know - we need to focus on the Enterprise, and the last time you checked, your company wasn't too happy with you browsing MySpace at work.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum (the user forum, that is) - what used to be called Knowledge Management has slowly transformed into Collaborative Computing. And because of it, all these neat social applications have been given a shave and a haircut and sent off to work. Wikis are replacing corporate intranets. RSS feeds are replacing paid news feed services. Blogs disseminate information instead of company newsletters. User forums are replacing town hall meetings. All of a sudden, "you" are in charge of content development. You, you, and yes, even you. All of you!

So what does this all mean? It means things are getting smaller and faster. Overhead will not be tolerated. And neither will slow reaction times. Customers continue to demand faster updates to their software - as things are fixed, not when a huge release is ready. They want capacity when they need it - and only when they need it. They don't want to do things unnecessarily - just enough to get a working product out the door. Vendors that can move with their customers will survive. Others, will not. Join me next week for a vendor shakedown!

—Nearly Redmond Nick

Dogs: A Lyric For Our Time

In less than two weeks, it will have been 30 years since Pink Floyd released Animals in January, 1977. It could not possibly be any more topical than it is today.

This, of course, is one defining mark of true art: it speaks to each succeeding generation with a uniquely renewed force and immediacy. Click on that graphic (it is not, of course, the original album cover: it's actually a building in Jersey City, an old dead power station) and listen to the excerpt from "Dogs," and think about the past six years. Then read the following, from John Rolfe.

Animals is very likely the most overlooked, underrated and underappreciated album by the classic Floyd foursome of Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, certainly when judged in the context of their success after Dark Side of the Moon. The album is brilliant on a number of levels – as Orwellian commentary on the sorry state of humanity; as a Floydian tour de force of mood, atmosphere and sound (particularly all those ghostly dogs barking and sheep bleating); and as a cheeky response to the punk rock movement that despised Pink Floyd as a prime example of all that was wrong with rock in the 70’s: bloated, ponderous, pompous, self-important and collapsing under the weight of its theatrics. The Floyd turned the tables by putting out a relatively spare record that contained the most consistently forceful playing of their career – from the sheer, mad rush of Dogs to the roaring power chords at the end of the Pigs (Three Different Ones) to the rampaging stomp of Sheep with its explosive climax. Even the cover itself – a power station with a pig floating over it – was a sly nod to the music that lay within.

Live, the shows on the 1977 In The Flesh tour were very likely the most commanding of that lineup’s career – and I saw them twice on their 1975 tour before taking in two ’77 shows at Madison Square Garden. Accompanied by second guitarist Snowy White and trusty saxophonist Dick Parry, the Floyd tore through all of Animals and Wish You Were Here with breathtaking power and clarity, not to mention some of Wright’s most transporting keyboard soundscapes. It was also fascinating to see and hear how Dogs had evolved from You Gotta Be Crazy and Sheep had been begotten by the even more menacing and careening Raving and Drooling. The Floyd had debuted Crazy and Raving on the ’75 tour before finally committing them to record two years later.

But as I said at the top, Animals got lost in the shadows of what came immediately before – Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here – and after – The Wall. But, like those other masterpieces, it holds up well 30 years later. It’s a bracing listen and, sadly, Roger Waters’ bilious appraisal of mankind’s ghastly behavior in the pursuit of power and fortune is still spot-on. The record still stands as his most bitter commentary on the subject – all bare knuckles where Dark Side of the Moon was shrouded in a succinct and gentle melancholy. Wish You Were Here targeted the ravages of fame and the insidious, coldhearted machinery of the recording industry. The Wall had more to do with psychosis and alienation, and The Final Cut was steeped in personal anguish over the death of Waters’ father in World War II and mankind’s inability to stop waging war. But Animals is just a simple, loud, angry, damning indictment of the human race. Best of all, it rocks like hell.

—John Rolfe

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone.

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We'll have more on this extraordinary album and the band that made it as the week progresses.

Geek Wednesday: Pig-Station 3

Before I let the cat out of the bag with Geek Wednesday, I'd like to recount an incident from my workday. I was checking the news headlines online and saw an item that made me want to reminisce with someone who could appreciate my feelings at the moment. I looked up and saw all the kids at their desks (the average age of our geeks is about 25), and knew it would be pointless with them. Then I saw one old-timer like me, and I called over to him: "Bill, did you hear about Altman? I remember as a teenager thinking that M*A*S*H was the greatest film ever made! Damn, I bet it's still good...Donald Sutherland was the Johnny Depp of his era...made you laugh just by walking into the frame...and Altman was the perfect director for him and Gould..."

This guy deserves the praise that is following him into the realm of the formless: he and his work were truly unique.

Geek Wednesday

Psychotic. You people have been sucked, brain-first, into an evolutionary vortex. Fighting, shooting, pushing, shoving, cursing one another...to get your hands on a machine that plays games.

Oh, hi everybody: it's Night the Cat here, with another edition of Geek Wednesday. Now mind you, I live in a psychotherapist's house, and I have not seen anything approaching the madness that you people will descend to in getting your gear. You're really, really scary when you get like this, do you know?

And guess where it all starts—with corporations and their advertising. Let's review the story that came out of Boston: the gamers themselves actually started out in good order—one of them organized a numbered list of people as they arrived to await the opening. Names would be called in groups, and order would be maintained. But then the store management (the store is owned by SONY) said that the list was useless and basically said, resign yourself to chaos, 'cause that's what you'll get.

So guess what they got? Yep, chaos, just as the corporate talking head predicted—and probably wanted. Sure, get it on the evening news, let the psychotic lust for the machine that does sim-warfare with brain-melting, addictive verisimilitude leap through the airwaves, infecting everyone it touches. This is the goal, the most devout wish for consummation that any corporate marketing dweeb can imagine: call it demonic viral marketing. Order is as repugnant to these people as the English language is to your President. Chaos fills the cash register.

Therefore, by the time the mayhem had started and the police arrived, the SONY marketers' ardent dream had come true: the crowd had turned into a mob. The cops made the store honor the original list that the gamers had devised. The whole story, and others even worse, may be found here.

Let's see if we can find any sanity in geekdom this week. Ah...no, never mind, not here: the Zune is incompatible with Vista. But in the name of Bast, you gotta love Microsoft: they're just so incredibly, doggedly incompetent that they make you laugh. Maybe that's why we keep giving MS our money, because they're so funny. Maybe that's also why Pelosi says impeachment is off the table: when Bush is gone, what will Stewart, Colbert, and Letterman have left to lampoon?

Another sign of lunacy: my human, the psychotherapist, calls it "emotional lability." Are MS and Novell friends (last week they were) or enemies, sniping at one another like a couple of Middle Eastern despots? If you care, then maybe you're just as certifiable as Gates and the whole lot of those corporate dogs...

All right, there's got to be some note of sanity in geekdom this week...let's see what Apple's up to, they're good for a little common sense most of the time, not to mention great products. OH NOOOOO, they're having a Black Friday event!!!!!

I give up—humans, you're on your own. As Roger Waters would say*:

And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.
And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone,
Dragged down by the stone.

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*Pink Floyd fans and lovers of great music: don't forget to bookmark Daily Rev (or use the links in the sidebar to add us to your RSS reader), because in January, 2007, we'll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of Animals, with reviews, insights, reminiscences from the band, and sound files of this epochal event in modern musical history.