An alternative question, of course, might posit as something like whether Jay Farrar meant, with his definitive statement of Son Volt’s “Tear Stained Eye”; to combat Roger Waters’ adamant denigration of the static, overly comfortable lifestyle. Farrar, on what sounds like the sort of musical cumulus cloud that must have been amassing in his mind over the course of years, declaims “Can you deny / There’s nothing greater / Nothing more / Than the traveling hands of time?”; and, at another point, “When the hours don’t move along… To hear your voice is not enough / It’s more than a shame”.
The song is beautiful and also heartbreaking, obviously, while meanwhile making the somewhat strange point that the passing of time should be held as the primary objective in life. (Of course, this is problematic as there’s nothing as sure to make it trudge along like molasses than the very gesture of trying to get it moving.)
Now, please let me preface the following discourse by voicing my mastodon fandom of Pink Floyd, and particularly of The Dark Side of the Moon — I think it’s one of the most touching paeans to a lost friend in the history of classic rock. As I think I’ve articulated on this site before, I interpret the “dark side of the moon” phrase as a sort of safe haven for the mentally unstable, people affected rashly by the harsh metaphorical “lights” of things like stardom, of pressure, stress, popularity, fame, etc. To state that you’re going to meet your friend on the “dark side of the moon” seems like the ultimate bada** sentiment, at least to me.
Well, as we know, a lot of substances went into the creation of a lot of this seminal, early psychedelic rock, and for every swatch of hard-won, timeless wisdom, there’s bound to be some delusional lunges and wayward notions. Check, for instance, Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love”; which seems to, along with apparently wielding the bizarre notion that the listener wouldn’t have already tried to “find somebody to love,” in the event they hadn’t that yet, almost encourage rape, or the type of “creepy” behavior that would have clashed with the protagonist’s prior behavioral norms and intuitions.
Anyway, Rogers’ not-so-golden-boy, if you will, floats along apparently in a dreamlike state, in the song “Time”: “And then one day you find / Ten years have got behind you / No one told you where to run / You missed the starting gun”. The character’s apparently idle habits are passed off as laziness or emptiness. The way I see it, though, nothing could be further from the truth, since if the character were actually experiencing ennui, or a shortage meaning in his or her everyday life, then the time wouldn’t have passed swiftly — it would have dragged like thick syrup. Instead, it raced by, implying a continually enjoyable experience of entertainment and growth, and, upon its passing, a face on this subject relatively unmarked by the everyday, deleterious marks of everyday life. Nice try, Waters, but I think you just recreated Zach Morris from Saved by the Bell, in an attempt to delineate a behavioral flaw. Eh, this stuff’s bound to wear off soon, anyway.
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