 Hey, if you like what I do and you want to help support my channel, the absolute best way to do that is by signing up to Nebula. If you sign up with the link in the description, a portion of your subscription fee will go directly to supporting my channel, and you'll get access to a bunch of cool stuff, including my full Dark Side of the Moon project, which you can now watch as a single hour-long video. 50 years ago today, Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. Almost immediately, it became their most acclaimed release, and okay look, I was gonna write like a whole spiel here about Dark Side of the Moon's many, many accomplishments, but I was up till like 3.30 last night. I'm exhausted, and let's be honest here, it's Dark Side of the Moon. You know. You already know. If you've ever had a stoner friend stepped foot into a college dorm or spoken with somebody over the age of 50, chances are you've already had someone extol the virtues of Dark Side of the Moon to you. Hell, I did an entire series taking on Dark Side of the Moon track by track, and by the way I've uploaded a full single video version of that series on Nebula if you want to watch it to mark the occasion. The stories of Dark Side of the Moon's making have been told and retold, and there's not really any point in me telling them again for the thousandth time today. But still, I think today's a pretty auspicious occasion in music history. And let's be honest, I love talking about Pink Floyd, and most of you love it when I talk about Pink Floyd. So today I just want to take a moment and look back at the last 50 years to see how Dark Side of the Moon has impacted music over that stretch, and why it's still relevant today. So let's drop that title card, I guess. Weirdly enough, what really got me thinking about making this video was Lil Yachty. About a month ago, Out of the Blue, mumble rapper Lil Yachty dropped a psychedelic rock album. While there's a number of influences present on Let's Start Here, Dark Side of the Moon and Pink Floyd are some of the biggest ones. The black seminal seems to be built around David Gilmore inspired guitar and ends on a transcendent vocal climax that calls to mind the great gig in the sky. There's a lot of people divided over this album, but honestly, I love it because I think it speaks to the unique staying power of Dark Side of the Moon. There's a lot of great albums from that era, and there's a lot of great Pink Floyd albums. These days I don't even know if Dark Side of the Moon is my personal favorite. I've been fixating hard on Wish You Were Here ever since I did my series on that album, but there's something different about Dark Side of the Moon. I feel like becoming obsessed with it is almost a rite of passage for young music fans. One of my formative memories is shutting all the lights off and blasting Dark Side of the Moon through my dad's stereo system one night when I was home alone at 16 years old. I don't know if that was the first time I'd heard that album, but it was the first time I'd properly listened to it. And I kind of think it took me like a decade to recover from that. Dark Side of the Moon opened my mind up. I know for me it was one of the first albums that truly showed me what the album as a medium was capable of. And it really is the perfect execution of the concept album, a collection of songs that each stand up individually, but when woven together, become greater than the sum of their parts. It wasn't the first concept album, but I do think it was the first of a certain type of concept album. One built around open vibes and existential questions. Without Dark Side of the Moon, you certainly never get something like OK Computer. You definitely don't get Yoshimi Battles of the Pink Robots. And don't even get me started on Porcupine Tree. Yet for something so influential, nobody else has been able to quite sound like Pink Floyd. When you look up similar albums online, you get recommendations for other massive ambitious concept albums. And while the ideas might have the same scope, I don't think any of them have the same sort of effortless flow and arrangement of Dark Side of the Moon. That might be why there's been so many artists that cover the album as a way of breaking it apart and seeing what makes it work. Some of the covers over the years have included live versions by Fish, a 2009 Track by Track remake by the Flaming Lips, and a 2006 remake that featured an all-star cast of guest musicians from across the prog world. Apparently Roger Waters is even taking a page out of Taylor Swift's book and recording his own cover version of the album right now. And then of course, there's 2002's Dubb Side of the Moon, a reggae and dub track by track cover by the Easy All Stars. That album gets to another key aspect of Dark Side of the Moon. It's placed within stoner culture. The album's high concept and wide open sound make it a favorite of smoky basements everywhere. The liner notes of Dubb Side of the Moon even include instructions for one of the quintessential stoner experiences, syncing the album up to The Wizard of Oz. The experience of watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon is sometimes called Dark Side of the Rainbow. And it's one of the greatest inventions of early internet culture. Born out of 90s web news groups, the scope of the myth ranges from noting the two works happen to match up well all the way to believing that Pink Floyd secretly created the album as a soundtrack to the movie. And for the record, the Dark Side of the Rainbow effect has a lot more to do with the human mind's ability to spot patterns than it does with any conspiracy about Pink Floyd secretly scoring this movie. But still, it's fun as hell and you should do it sometime if you haven't. Part of what makes Dark Side of the Moon so sticky as a cultural artifact is the iconography around it. Hypnosis's cover design is a marvelous piece of minimalism. It's probably the single most recognizable album cover of all time. And it looks incredible on t-shirts, posters, and really just about anything. I think this gets to the core of Dark Side of the Moon's success. It was just this moment where everything happened to come together in the perfect way. Pink Floyd were at the perfect time in their career and collaborated with the perfect engineer and the perfect package designers. It was released at a moment where rock was entering its third decade of existence and was looking to reinvent itself and really establish itself as high art. And it dropped to an audience thirsty for albums that were beautiful visual artifacts and stimulating intellectual experiences. But above all, I think Dark Side of the Moon has the legacy it does because it's really friggin' good. Seriously, it's a good album. I know it's a sort of boring trite take. I know it tops lists all the time. But Dark Side of the Moon fucking rules. It's a musical and lyrical exploration of the condition that is modernity. And in the 50 years since its release, that condition has only accelerated and become more inscrutable, more absurd. Dark Side of the Moon is still important today because even 50 years later, it perfectly describes how it feels to live in our world. And yeah, it might be an uninspired take to say Dark Side of the Moon is great. And yeah, even just talking about it in this video is probably contributing to a glut of, you know, pseudo-intellectual music assholes like me, who wax poetic about Dark Side of the Moon all the time. But if we can't celebrate this album, I don't know, like, what can we celebrate? Because, like I said, it's great. I don't know. I'm just rambling at this point. There's no script in front of me. There's a blank page. I don't even know if I'm going to keep this audio. Go listen to Dark Side of the Moon. It's been 50 years. It's still relevant. And you know what? 50 years from now, when I'm aging and my mind is fading and Dark Side of the Moon is 100 years old, it'll still be relevant because it rules. And that's it. If this video has you itching to learn more about Dark Side of the Moon, you should check out my Dark Side of the Moon project on Nebula, which I've now uploaded in a full single hour-long video. And once you're done that, you can check out my Wish You Were Here companion, a 40-minute video that runs perfectly in sync with the entirety of Wish You Were Here. If all this sounds cool to you, you can get a year of Nebula for just two and a half bucks a month by going to the link in the description. 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