From Pink Floyd’s mental hell to the secret lair of space Nazis, artists have striven unceasingly to sketch the side of the moon China’s Chang’e 4 just reached
‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” These could easily have been the words of the Chinese team behind Chang’e 4, shortly before it set off on its successful journey to the moon’s far side. But as any rock fan will tell you, they were immortalised 45 years ago at the end of Pink Floyd’s track Brain Damage. It was the line that gave their most famous album, The Dark Side of the Moon, its title. And it remains one of the most enduring phrases in popular culture – copied, spoofed and riffed on by generations to come (even Krusty the Clown has a “lost” album entitled Dark Side of the Moonpie).
It’s not hard to see why artists have a fascination with the moon’s far side. It speaks of the unknowable, the distant and the elusive – and is especially ripe for metaphor. For Pink Floyd, the moon’s dark side was used to symbolise the darker forces of human nature on an album that delved into unusual territories for pop: mental illness, mortality and the scars of the second world war. As songwriter Roger Waters explained in the 1994 book Bricks in the Wall: “The line ‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’ is me speaking to the listener, saying, ‘I know you have these bad feelings and impulses because I do too, and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share with you the fact that I feel bad sometimes.’”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2F2Qs3z
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