Sheep

I just listened to Sheep, on Pink Floyd’s Animals, walking on the way to work. Have you ever noticed just how freaking corrosive that song is? It almost oozes it. I can totally understand why this isn’t one of the favorites of Pink Floyd’s 70s albums. At the end of the first lyric of the song, Roger Waters’ voice blends seamlessly into a nasty-sounding synthesizer — really fantastic mixing. And then at the end almost with glee he shouts “wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream” — I really registered the lyric for the first time just now — it sort of played back in my head after I’d heard it, in a way that most lines of Shakespeare do on first listen — being as they contain such a wealth of meaning. Here the words are not so fantastic or broad (and perhaps a bit too vague), but they blend so well with the general aural corrosion of the song — in a “poetic” way — and then comes the final ecstatic electric guitar coda, corrosion without abandon.

Man, what a track. I was smiling without abandon hearing it in this new way — not at all in the way I would listen to this album back in college.

I started thinking about nature, and how it’s inconclusive in its verdict: on the one hand we are made of star stuff and so equality blah blah blah, but on the other, everywhere you look in nature there are different organisms, different constructs using those same building blocks. Everywhere different. Serving different functions in different ways, though the functions may be abstracted and understood as The One Action, much the same as “we are all star stuff.”

What we can say is that nature works through the cooperation of neighboring elements. Everywhere in nature neighboring elements interact, fuse, form symbioses, evolve together, alongside their community.

Yes, this we can say.