ANIMALS

When I was very young, around five years old, PINK FLOYD's "Animals" was released. They tell me I would get the screaming terrors whenever one of my older siblings would play this album; I like to think that the subconscious impression it made on me forms much of the basis for my musical tastes. I grew to appreciate music that was unsettling and mysterious, and re-discovered PF about ten years later (a child's lifetime!). For a while, I cherished every album the band had released (except "Piper", which was too Brit-Psychedelic for me, and "Momentary Lapse" which- besides the fact that I didn't like it-came out just as I was losing my interest in Prog rock). I remember listening to "Animals" and being swept away into a dark and dangerous world, much more full of menace than the impersonal alienation of "Shine" and the ultra-personal self-imposed exile of "The Wall". In fact, this album gave me the creeps in the same dazed, out-of- focus way that parts of Ummagumma gave me, and I loved it. Flash forward to my late 20's, early 30's; I hadn't listened to PF or much Prog at all for at least a decade and I was nostalgic, so I picked up a used cassette of "Animals" and listened to it on my way home from work one day. I knew what to expect, and hoped some of the old lovely creepiness would touch me again. What I didn't expect was that this time around, I now had enough experience with the world to actually understand what was being sung...and it didn't just creep me out, it scared me s**tless. I started to empathize with "Dogs" instead of sharing the usual detached criticism. I had fallen into the office grind, 9 to 5 world and suddenly it was possible that I could turn into "just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer." The entire album seemed to perfectly portray the world around me, in all it's depressing and dehumanizing shades of grey and black. I'm usually a fairly even, rational person and I actually couldn't bring myself to listen to the album again for quite a while...and so I have to say that due to the varied, far- reaching and powerful emotional impact this album has had on me at three different times in my life, I regard it as the best PF album and one of the major musical influences on my life.