Alessandro Besselva Averame
Pink Floyd. The Lunatic.

Pink Floyd. The Lunatic. Commented Lyrics, by Alessandro Besselva Averame. Arcana, Rome, Nov. 2008.

Second-to-last volume (No. 16) of the "commented lyrics" series by Arcana. As with the 17th (brrrr...), dedicated to Genesis (DeLiso), some concepts presented in the previous review apply here as well. In short, we can say that the problems of the "fragmented" text remain significant enough to compromise any serious work of commentary, interpretation, or analysis.

With Pink Floyd (PF), there is an additional issue. The lyrics are sometimes what they are (Waters is not Gabriel and, for the sake of the fans, Gabriel is not Waters). The PF lyrics depend (in the sense that they show dependency) on the music much more than with Genesis (Gabriel's G). Many of PF's historic tracks, especially the more extended ones, project on an unconscious level the "already said in music" within the text, enhancing its essence; and even when it becomes more extended (see for example "Dogs"), the mental imagery and visions fundamentally continue to arise from the music and only minimally from the lyrics. With Gabriel's G it is exactly the opposite. This partly explains a lot of things that I won't tell you, otherwise the Genesis fans will copy me to write their next book (...).

Now I believe the issue is clear. The idea of writing a book of commentary and/or interpretation on PF's lyrics must also foreground the analysis of the musical content. This is not done, and when it is done, it is done superficially. If in tracks like "Saucerful," "Atom," "Careful," "Echoes," "Shine," "Welcome," there's more music than words (or only music!), it means that the above idea is doomed from the start. Make no mistake: if there are few words, or none at all, it's because they are not necessary. Conversely, if Gabriel has many, never too many, it's precisely because they are necessary (and sometimes not even enough). So, to quote another guy who cherished words, This is the end / Beautiful friend.

I could stop here since I'm often accused of being too lengthy. But if I stop, then they say I didn't write anything specific about the book and just beat around the bush, barking at it. Well, let's then make a direct incursion at the level of interpretative criticism.

«Let there be more light - Set the controls for the heart of the sun - (a saucerful of secrets)» The sci-fi and/or extraterrestrial metaphor is what it is and should be explored as such. This idea of the spaceship crashing into the Sun, besides being banal, nullifies the psycho-psychedelic potential of the symbol/vision (UFO, little alien, hominid, spaceship, survivor, whatever you prefer). The vision of UFOs, which Jung indicated as a "Modern Myth," should wake us up then, but truly wake us up! Love, sexual, is the psychedelic condition of the journey toward the light of the Absolute (the Sun). The shadow is the unconscious to be probed in the journey. It doesn't take much to understand it. It would just require setting aside a certain monstrous cultural provincialism of a reactionary nature that since the mid-Seventies has taken over the Ego and gradually obliterated the field of inquiry into the unconscious. («subconscious»? Damn, the words! – see intro title p. 14).

More on the technical side and less philosophical: the "Middle Eastern-sounding" scales (Damn! How do you write? Words are important!* – see p. 98) that the author indicates in "Set the controls" actually originate in "Let there be more light" (a title, a program). This explains the fusion in the music/word journey which, through the use of modal scales, associated with irregular rhythmic-metric scansions, prepares for the psychedelic journey. That the use of specific ancient modalities (neither major nor minor scales, to put it simply) awakens from the collective unconscious sound images that refer to an archaic mystical Middle East is once again proof that nothing happens by chance.

And here, to complement the previous review (see above), we add a singular statement by Stockhausen (Modena, 2003): «I am at the origin of a vast number of sound experiments». (Uh! Uh, uh, uh...).

ET

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtP3FWRo6Ow