70's aleniation concept albums

If I were the good man I'd understand the spaces between friends...almost all the lyrics by Waters are about alienation. I would have added Mike Rutherford's Smallcreep's Day, but it's only on one LP side. 

 

I'm a little afraid to ask (difficult already to understand your posts in a normal/plain context, let alone asking you to explain further), but how do you figure?

 

TFTO is Jon's schmaltry-paltry drivel to achieving heaven & bliss and such frivolities (though yeah, it could be ranked in the heavy drug consumption category).

 

Nothing about feeling rejected from society

The actual concept of Crime of the Century is the HUBRIS, or fatal flaws of mankind: 

1) paranoia ("School", "Bloody Well Right")

2) mental illness ("Hide in Your Shell", "Asylum")

3) self-deception/disillusionment ("Dreamer", "Rudy"), and

4) self-destruction ("If Everyone was Listening", "Crime of the Century").

It's at this point that I must mention that the band has always denied any connection between the songs, as if the album were just 8 songs haphazardly thrown together that by some cosmic fluke propelled them to international acclaim. My response is to read the lyrics, and take note of the song-sequencing. How did the words and music from a very obscure British band somehow resonate with a worldwide audience in spite of ZERO support from the media? Even if they don't understand it all at first, people somehow just "get" the universal themes this album so eloquently lays out.  

It's only knock and know-all, but I like it. 

Seriously though I was scratching my head at that drug addiction theme. I'd say sexual discovery, liberation, abuse, rejection, and shame area much bigger part of the album's theme. In fact the whole plot could be construed as a kind of sexual awakening for Real, which also resembles a really wild acid trip, filled with all sorts of incredible mythological and religious allusions. He runs around with a tough gang as a pretty young man (or even a teen), gets a certain idea about what it is to be a man, and what sex is and what it's for. He reads up on how to do it right once he realizes that it shouldn't be a one sided thing like he maybe learned in his gang, but he still gets it wrong and feels ashamed (I think there may be a naive rape in there).  Later he finds himself seemingly punished for his actions, or maybe his psyche is punishing him for his inability to please the woman he chose to have sex with. He's shrunken down to the size of an insect, then trying to decide who to follow in a world full of disparate beliefs and no easy way out, then winds up following someone who leads him astray despite seeming innocent and leads him to death in a subway tunnel, only he doesn't die and instead approaches a pool of even more nefarious creatures, The Lamia. He gives into their temptation of sexual pleasure, but something about him causes them to suffer by trying to devour him. Maybe he has too true of intentions? Maybe he's too young? Maybe he's spoiled and they were expecting a virgin? Hard to say without research. He winds up traveling to the colony of slippermen, who seem to be sexually deviant monstrosities, and they welcome him as one of their own. Realizing his desires would turn him into a monster, he has his genitals removed to stop himself by force, only they're stolen by a raven and in the end he has to choose between saving his genitals, returning home, or saving his brother, who turns out to be himself. And that's kind of where it all fades to white and Gabriel attempts a moral with the closing number, which is also him lampooning himself. Very strange psychological drama, in some places horror. Beautifully illustrated, compellingly narrated, even if the plot and the reasoning is all pretty fuzzy, but then I think it's supposed to be dense and intangible, like a particularly long and vivid dream.

That's one interpretation anyway.