What Makes Salvador Dalí’s Iconic Surrealist Painting “The Persistence of Memory” a Great Work of Art
Salvador Dalí painted melting clocks. This is not as drastic an oversimplification as it sounds: after first painting such a counterintuitive image, “Dalí, who knew the importance of branding, would use the melting clocks for his entire career.” So says no less an expert than James Payne, the gallerist and video essayist behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained. In its latest episode Payne takes on the unrelentingly prolific Dalí’s most famous canvas of all, The Persistence of Memory. Completed in 1931, this work of art has by now spent about half a century adorning the walls of college dorm rooms, among other spaces inhabited by viewers interested in the alteration of their own perceptive faculties.
The Persistence of Memory doesn’t mark Dalí’s first use of melting clocks, though it’s without doubt his most important. Yet “despite its huge cultural impact,” says Payne, the painting is “quite small, about the size of a sheet of paper.” Against the background of “a huge desert landscape with vast depths of field, reduced to a shrunken world” — one harboring references to Goya, De Chirico, and Bosch — it vividly realizes a moment in the process of metamorphosis.
“A key concept in the Surrealist movement,” metamorphosis is here “exemplified by the paradox of Dalí’s rendering of the hardest and most mechanical objects, watches, into a soft and flaccid form.” Like all of the artist’s best work, it thus “exploits the ambiguity of our perceptual process and plays with our own fears.” But what do the melting clocks mean?
That, to Dalí’s own mind, is the wrong question: “I am against any kind of message,” he declared in one of his many television appearances. Indeed, his frequent appearances on television (What’s My Line?, The Mike Wallace Interview, The Dick Cavett Show) and in other media assured that, at a certain point, “Dalí the artist had become a prisoner of Dalí the celebrity.” But his appearances in the spotlight also gave him the chance to disseminate the chaff of conflicting explanations of his own work. Perhaps the melting clocks refer to Einstein’s then-novel theory of relativity; perhaps they symbolize impotence. Or it may all come down to Dalí’s obsession with death, which even in 1931 had long since taken both his mother and the younger brother of whom he believed himself a reincarnation. In the event, Dalí couldn’t escape mortality. None of us can, of course, and that, as much as anything else, may illuminate why The Persistence of Memory never quite passes into the realm of kitsch.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Will Be Retold from a Woman’s Point of View
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been a byword for totalitarian dystopia longer than most of us have been reading books. But apart from its the title and certain words from its invented “newspeak” — doubleplusgood, unperson, thoughtcrime — how deeply is George Orwell’s best-known novel embedded into the culture? Most of us recognize the name Winston Smith, and many of us may even remember details of his job at the Ministry of Truth, where the facts of history are continually rewritten to suit ever-shifting political exigencies. But how much do we know about the other major character: Julia, Winston’s fellow ministry employee who becomes his clandestine co-dissident and forbidden lover?
“In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.” Julia’s amorality throws the rigidity of Winston’s own attitudes into contrast, and also shows up their impracticality. Now, in the hands of novelist Sandra Newman, Julia will become not just star of the story but its narrator.
Or so it looks, at least, from the brief passage quoted in the Guardian’s announcement of Julia, a re-telling of Nineteen Eighty-Four approved by Orwell’s estate and to be published in time for the 75th anniversary of the original. Though it has no firm publication date yet, Julia will come out some time after Newman’s next book The Men, in which, as the Guardian’s Alison Flood puts it, “every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes from the world.” It will join an abundance of recent retellings from the woman’s point of view, including everything from “Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a version of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which centers on the life of Shakespeare’s wife.”
Entrusting a literary property to a writer of another era, culture, and sensibility is a tricky business, but there arguably has never been a more opportune time to put out a book like Julia. It seems the dystopia-hungry public has never been readier to identify the “Orwellian” in life, nor more responsive to re-interpretations and expansions of long-established bodies of popular myth. And what with women having conquered the world of fiction, there will naturally be great interest in Julia’s take on life under Big Brother — as well as in its inevitable television adaptation.
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George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Taschen Publishes the First 21 Stories of Spider Man in a High Resolution, Extra-Large Format Art Book
Marvel Comics and art book publisher TASCHEN have announced an agreement to publish Marvel’s rarest classic comics “in their original glory, in an extra-large format.” And it all starts with Spider Man. The first volume in the Marvel-TASCHEN series reproduces the first 21 stories of Spider Man, originally published between 1962–1964. TASCHEN has attempted to “create an ideal representation of these books as they were produced at the time of publication.” The editions feature super-high-resolution photographs of each page, “using modern retouching techniques to correct problems with the era’s inexpensive, imperfect printing.”
You can explore the new Spider Man editions here. The next titles in ‘The Marvel Comics Library’ series will be Avengers. Vol. 1. 1963–1965, Fantastic Four. Vol. 1. 1961–1963 and Captain America. They’re scheduled for release in 2022 and 2023. Keep an eye out…
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Read More...Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting “The Scream” Animated to Pink Floyd’s Primal Music
In this short video, Romanian animator Sebastian Cosor brings together two haunting works from different times and different media: The Scream, by Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), and “The Great Gig in the Sky,” by the British rock band Pink Floyd.
Munch painted the first of four versions of The Scream in 1893. He later wrote a poem describing the apocalyptic vision behind it:
I was walking along the road with two Friends
the Sun was setting — the Sky turned a bloody red
And I felt a whiff of Melancholy — I stood
Still, deathly tired — over the blue-black
Fjord and City hung Blood and Tongues of Fire
My Friends walked on — I remained behind
– shivering with anxiety — I felt the Great Scream in Nature
Munch’s horrific Great Scream in Nature is combined in the video with Floyd’s otherworldly “The Great Gig in the Sky,” one of the signature pieces from the band’s 1973 masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. The vocals on “The Great Gig” were performed by an unknown young songwriter and session singer named Clare Torry.
Torry had been invited by producer Alan Parsons to come to Abbey Road Studios and improvise over a haunting piano chord progression by Richard Wright, on a track that was tentatively called “The Mortality Sequence.” The 25-year-old singer was given very little direction from the band. “Clare came into the studio one day,” said bassist Roger Waters in a 2003 Rolling Stone interview, “and we said, ‘There’s no lyrics. It’s about dying — have a bit of a sing on that, girl.’ ”
Forty-two years later, that “bit of a sing” can still send a shiver down anyone’s spine. For more on the making of “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and Torry’s amazing contribution, see the clip below to hear Torry’s story in her own words.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...‘The Character of Physical Law’: Richard Feynman’s Legendary Course Presented at Cornell, 1964
Lecture One, The Law of Gravitation:
“Nature,” said physicist Richard Feynman, “uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
With those words Feynman ended the first of his famous 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, a talk entitled “The Law of Gravitation, an Example of Physical Law.” (See above.) The lectures were intended by Feynman as an introduction, not to the fundamental laws of nature, but to the very nature of such laws. The lectures were later transcribed and collected in The Character of Physical Law, one of Feynman’s most widely read books. In the introduction to the Modern Library edition, writer James Gleick gives a brief assessment of the charismatic man at the lectern:
Feynman, then forty-six years old, did theoretical physics as spectacularly as anyone alive. He was due to win the Nobel Prize the next year for his groundbreaking work in the 1940s in quantum electrodynamics, a theory that tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, magnetism, and electricity. He had taken the century’s early, half-made conceptions of waves and particles and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could use and understand. This was esoteric science–more so in the decades that followed–and Feynman was not a household name outside physics, but within his field he had developed an astounding stature. He had a mystique that came in part from sheer pragmatic brilliance–in any group of scientists he could create a dramatic impression by slashing his way through a difficult problem–and in part, too, from his personal style–rough-hewn, American, seemingly uncultivated.
All seven of Feynman’s lectures were recorded by the British Broadcasting Corporation and presented as part of BBC Two’s “Further Education Scheme.” In 2009 Bill Gates bought the rights to the videos and made them available to the public on Microsoft’s Project Tuva Web site.
Since then the series has become available on YouTube for easier viewing. As you scroll down the page you can access the videos which, “more than any other recorded image or document,” writes physicist Lawrence Krauss in Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, “capture the real Feynman, playful, brilliant, excited, charismatic, energetic, and no nonsense.”
You can find the remaining video lectures below:
Lecture Two, The Relation of Mathematics to Physics:
Lecture Three, The Great Conservation Principles:
Lecture Four, Symmetry in Physical Law:
Lecture Five, The Distinction of Past and Future:
Lecture Six, Probability and Uncertainty–The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature:
Lecture Seven, Seeking New Laws:
You can find this course indexed in our list of Free Online Physics Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Read More...Punks, Goths, and Mods on TV (1983)
The Rivethead preoccupation with fashion is inescapably related to their anxiety over being confused for subcultures they profess to hate: Goths, Punks, Metalheads, Death Rockers… The fact that so many subcultures claim black as their color of choice contributes to the confusion.
There are two points upon which theorists of post-industrial British subcultures generally agree: 1) No matter the music or the fashion, the boundaries between one subculture and another were rigorously, even violently, enforced (hence the wars between the mods and rockers), and; 2) The music and fashions of every subculture were subject to cooptation by the machinery of capitalism, to be mass produced, packaged, and sold as off-the-rack commodity, a phenomenon that occurred almost as soon as punks, mods, rockers, goths, teddy boys, skinheads, New Romantics, etc. began appearing on television — as in the post-Grundy Irish TV appearance of four young individuals above from 1983.
The interviewer introduces these punks, goths, and mods by referring first to their employment — or lack of employment — status, and then to the number of children in their family. Comments dripping with class disdain sit alongside a characterization of various subcultures as “gangs” — the Hell’s Angels thrown in among them just to drive the point home. Of course, there’s more to say about the denizens of early-80s UK subcultural street corners — more than these four representatives have to say themselves. It is communicated through performance rather than verbal exposition, through the affiliations of clothing, music, and pose — as in the mini-historical slideshow of late-20th century British subcultures below, from the 50s to the 80s.
In 1979, British theorist Dick Hebdige published what many considered the definitive analysis of these working-class scenes, which frequently centered around forms of racial and cultural exchange — as with mods who loved jazz or punks who loved ska and dub reggae; or racial and cultural exclusion — as with fascist skinheads and chauvinist teddy boys who glorified the past, while other subcultural ideologies looked to the future (or, as the case may be, no future).
Hebdige’s Subculture: the Meaning of Style begins with a story about French writer Jean Genet, humiliated in prison by homophobic guards over his possession of a tube of Vaseline:
Like Genet, we are interested in subculture – in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups – the teddy boys and mods and rockers, the skinheads and the punks – who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons.
The irony of subcultures is that they identify with social outsiders, while re-enforcing boundaries that create exclusivity (cf. the quote at the top, from Hebdige-inspired Subcultures List). When the novelty and shock recedes, they become ripe fodder for commercial cooptation, even luxury branding.
What we usually don’t get from tame retrospectives, or from patronizing mass media of the time, are deviant outsiders like Genet who cannot be reabsorbed into the system because their very existence poses a threat to the social order as so construed. So much of the fashion and music of post-war Britain was directly created or inspired by West Indian migrants of the Windrush generation, for example. In too many popular representations of postwar British subcultures, that essential part of the working class UK subculture story has been entirely left out.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How Well Can You Move in Medieval Armor?: Medievalist Daniel Jaquet Gives It a Try in Real Life
If you’ve ever run a marathon in costume, or for that matter, boarded public transportation with a large musical instrument or a bulky bag of athletic equipment, you know that gear can be a burden best shed.
But what if that gear is your first, nay, best line of defense against a fellow knight fixing to smite you in the name of their liege?
Such gear is non-optional.
Curious about the degree to which 15th-century knights were encumbered by their protective plating, medievalist Daniel Jaquet commissioned a top armor specialist from the Czech Republic to make a suit specific to his own personal measurements. The result is based on a 15th century specimen in Vienna that has been studied by the Wallace Collection’s archaeometallurgist Alan Williams. As Jaquet recalled in Sciences et Avenir:
We had to make compromises in the copying process, of course, because what interested me above all was to be able to do a behavioral study, to see how one moved with this equipment on the back rather than attaching myself to the number of exact rivets…we knew the composition and the hardness of the parts that we could compare to our replica.
The accomplished martial artist tested his mobility in the suit with a variety of highly public, modern activities: reaching for items on the highest supermarket shelves, jogging in the park, scaling a wall at a climbing gym, taking the Metro …
It may look like showboating, but these movements helped him assess how he’d perform in combat, as well as lower stress activities involving sitting down or standing up.
Out of his metal suit, Jaquet has been known to amuse himself by analyzing the verisimilitude of Game of Thrones’ combat scenes. (Conclusion: some liberties were taken, armor-wise, in that gruesome face off between the Mountain and the Viper.)
An invitation to travel to New York City to present at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered an unexpected testing opportunity, compliments of the airline’s baggage restrictions:
For reasons of weight, space and cost, the solution to wear the armor over me was considered the best.
(The TSA officers at Newark were not amused...)
His armored experience sheds light on those of early 15th-century knight Jean le Maingre, aka Boucicaut, whose impressive career was cut short in 1415, when he was captured by the English at the Battle of Agincourt.
Boucicaut kept himself in tip top physical condition with a regular armored fitness regimen. His chivalric biography details gearing up for exercises that include running, chopping wood, vaulting onto a horse, and working his way up a ladder from the underside, without using his feet.
Jaquet duplicates them all in the above video.
(Reminder to those who would try this at home, make sure you’re capable of performing these exercises in lightweight shorts and t‑shirt before attempting to do them in armor.)
Like Boucicault’s, Jaquet’s armor is bespoke. Those who’ve struggled to lift their arms in an off-the-rack jacket will appreciate the trade off. It’s worth spending more to ensure sufficient range of movement.
In Boucicault’s day, ready-made pieces of lesser quality could be procured at markets, trading fairs, and shops in populous areas. You could also try your luck after battle, by stripping the captive and the dead of theirs. Size was always an issue. Too small and your movement would be restricted. Too big, and you’d be hauling around unnecessary weight.
Jaquet describes his load as being on par with the weight 21st-century soldiers are required to carry. Body armor is a lifesaver, according to a 2018 study by the Center for a New American Security, but it also reduces mobility, increases fatigue, and reduces mission performance.
Gizmodo’s Jennifer Ouellette finds that medieval knights faced similar challenges:
The legs alone were carrying an extra 15 to 18 pounds, so the muscles had to work that much harder to overcome inertia to set the legs in motion. There is also evidence that the thin slits in the face mask, and tight chest plate, restricted oxygen flow even further.
Read a detailed, scholarly account of Jaquet’s armor experiment in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History.
For those looking for a lighter read, here is Jaquet’s account of taking a commercial flight in armor (and some best practice tips for those attempting the same.)
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Read More...Stephen Fry Explains How to Deal with Bullying
Stephen Fry got sent off to a faraway boarding school at the age of seven. His subsequent years of student life far from home taught him, among other things, a set of effective strategies to deflect bullying. (“I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb,” he once said when asked at what point he acknowledged his sexuality, and that must have given him plenty of time to consider what it was to stand outside the mainstream.) The particular line he recommends delivering in the Q&A clip above (recorded at The Oxford Union) may not be for everyone, but he also has a larger point to make, and he makes it with characteristic eloquence. The eternal threat of bullying, he says, is “why nature gave us, or enough of a percentage of us, wit — or at least what might pass for it.”
Wit, which Fry possesses in a famous abundance, must surely have carried him through a great many situations both professional and personal. A modern-day intellectual and aesthetic heir to Oscar Wilde, Fry has the advantage of having lived in a time and place without being subject to the kind of punishment visited on the author of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” But that doesn’t mean he’s had an easy time of it. He cites an “ancient metaphor” he’s kept in mind: “No matter how dark it is, the smallest light is visible; no matter how light it is, a bit of dark is nothing.” The challenges he’s faced in life — none of them a million miles, presumably, from the kind endured by those seen to be different in other ways — have sent him to the wells of history, philosophy, and even mythology.
“We have to return to Nietzsche,” Fry says, and specifically The Birth of Tragedy. “He argued that tragedy was born out of ancient Greece, out of a spirit that the Athenians had as they grew up as a special tribe that somehow managed to combine two qualities of their twelve Olympic deities.” Some of these qualities were embodied in Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Apollo, god of harmony, music, mathematics, and rhetoric. But then we have Dionysius, “god of wine and festival and riot. Absolute riot.” Tragedies, according to Nietzsche, “look at the fact that all of us are torn in two,” with part of us inclined toward Athenian and Apollonian pursuits, where another part of us “wants to wrench our clothes off, dive into the grapes, and make slurping, horrible noises of love and discord.”
This all comes down to the thoroughly modern myth that is Star Trek. On the Enterprise we have Mr. Spock, who embodies “reason, logic, calculation, science, and an absolute inability to feel”; we have Bones, “all gut reaction”; and “in the middle, trying to be a perfect mix of the two of them,” we have Captain Kirk, “who wanted the humanity of Bones, but some of the reasoning judgment of Spock.” The Enterprise, in a word, is us: “Each one of us, if we examine ourselves, knows there is an inner beast who is capable of almost anything — in mind, at least — and there is an inner monk, an inner harmonious figure.” Each side keeps getting the better of the other, turning even the bullied into bullies on occasion. The best you can do, in Fry’s view, is to “go forth, be mad, be utterly proud of who you are — whatever you are — and for God’s sake, try everything.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...When the Colosseum in Rome Became the Home of Hundreds of Exotic Plant Species
The Colosseum is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, and thus one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many visitors has changed over the centuries. In the Atlantic, novelist and podcaster Paul Cooper notes that, “the belief that Christian martyrs had once been fed to the lions in the arena,” for example, once made it a renowned site of religious pilgrimage. (This “despite little evidence that Christians were ever actually killed in the arena.”) But in that same era, the Colosseum was also a site of botanic pilgrimage: amid its ruins grew “420 species of plant,” including some rare examples “found nowhere else in Europe.”
Notable tourists who took note of the Colosseum’s rich plant life include Charles Dickens, who beheld its “walls and arches overgrown with green,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote of how “the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet.”
Cooper quotes from these writings in his Atlantic piece, and in an associated Twitter thread also includes plenty of renderings of the Colosseum as it then looked during the 18th and 19th centuries. He even selected images from Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, or, Illustrations and descriptions of four hundred and twenty plants growing spontaneously upon the ruins of the Colosseum of Rome (readable free online at the Internet Archive), the 1855 work of a less well-known Englishman named Richard Deakin.
A botanist, Deakin did the hard work of cataloging those hundreds of plant species growing in the Colosseum back in the 1850s. The intervening 170 or so years have taken their toll on this biodiversity: as Nature reported it, only 242 of these species were still present in the early 2000s, due in part to “a shift towards species that prefer a warmer, drier climate” and the growth of the surrounding city. In its heyday in the first centuries of the last millennium, the arena lay on the outskirts of Rome, whereas it feels central today. Pay it a visit, and you both will and will not see the Colosseum that Dickens and Shelley did; but then, they never knew it as, say, Titus or Domitian did. In recent years there have been moves to restore and even improve ancient features like the retractable floor; why not double down on the exotic flora while we’re at it?
via The Atlantic
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Pink Floyd’s Entire Studio Discography is Now on YouTube: Stream the Studio & Live Albums
Approached with little prior knowledge, Pink Floyd is an enigma. A stadium rock band renowned for massive laser light shows and a pioneering use of quadraphonic and holophonic sound, they are also best appreciated at home — alone or with a few true fans — on a pair of high fidelity stereo speakers or headphones, under the hazy purplish-greenish glow of a blacklight poster. The experience of their classic albums is paradoxically one of “shared solitary contemplation”; their live shows are an expansion of the home listening environment, where fans first received an “education from cousins and older brothers of friends as to the seriousness (and stoner sacrament) of The Dark Side of the Moon,” as Martin Popoff writes in Pink Floyd: Album by Album. Both enormously popular and daringly experimental, it’s hard to place them comfortably in one camp or another.
Listeners who came to the band during their 1970s heyday, “in the years between The Dark Side of the Moon and The Final Cut,” Bill Kopp writes, “were largely unaware of what the band had done before the period….. The fact highlights a remarkable feature of Pink Floyd’s popularity: casual fans knew of the band’s work from The Dark Side of the Moon onward; more serious students of the group were familiar with the band’s 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, made when Pink Floyd was led by its founder, Roger Keith ‘Syd’ Barrett.”
The split is curious because the 70s space rock version of the band who made the third best-selling album of all time owed so much to its psychedelic founder, who slipped completely from view as he slipped away from the music industry.
As Andy Mabbett writes in his book Pink Floyd: The Music and the Mystery:
Barrett’s withdrawal from music had long ago become a source of intrigue, one of the most mystifying sagas in rock, but his contribution to the group as their first singer, guitarist and songwriter was crucial to there ever being a Pink Floyd in the first place. Syd might not have played much of a role in the classic recordings Pink Floyd produced in the Seventies, but everyone — not least the group themselves — long ago realized that all this might never have happened were it not for Syd’s initial inspiration.
At their best, during the golden years of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here, the band remembered their history while expanding their early avant-blues rock into the outer reaches of space. Dark Side contained their first hit singles since their 1967 debut and introduced new fans to Barrett indirectly via the lyrics of “Brain Damage” (originally called “Lunatic”) and the “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” suite. The cynicism and sense of doom that seemed to take over as Roger Waters became the band’s primary songwriter found its foil in Barrett’s continued influence — in his absence — on the band during the early 70s.
But in the 70s one had to work particularly hard to get caught up on the early mythos of Pink Floyd, tracking down LPs of albums like Meddle, Atom Heart Mother, and Ummagumma. As early albums were reissued on tape and CD, it became a little easier to familiarize oneself with Pink Floyd’s many historical phases — from experimental psych-rock pioneers to stadium-filling prog-rock superstars. These days, that experience can be had in an afternoon on YouTube. The band has put their studio discography and three live performances online and you can find links below (with a few choice cuts above).
Studio
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Live
Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81
Does the ridiculous ease of finding this music now clear up the enigma of Pink Floyd? Maybe. Or maybe no amount of streaming convenience will dispel “the mystery,” Mabbett writes, “that grew around their reluctance to be photographed or interviewed for much of the Seventies, the lack of singles during the same crucial period, the imaginative album packaging, the crisp live sound, the spectacular theatrical shows — and, of course, a special magic that cannot be copied no matter how much money or equipment is available.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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