The Moon Landing Inspired Pink Floyd’s Most Overlooked Song – The Atlantic

23 luglio 2019 alle 21:38 · Filed under Acido, Catarsi, Concerti, Creatività, Deep Space, Empatia, Energia, Experimental, Oscurità, OuterSpace, Postumanismo, Surrealtà and tagged: Luce oscura, Luna, Pink Floyd, Ridefinizioni alternative, Siderale, Video

È stato appena festeggiato il mezzo secolo dell’allunaggio, uno dei capisaldi culturali di quell’evento fu lo show che i PinkFloyd fecero live per la BBC, lo stesso giorno in cui gli astronauti approdarono sul nostro satellite; suonarono MoonHead, un piccolo capolavoro siderale e psichedelico che incarnava assai bene le aspettative surreali che il mondo si attendeva dalla nuova epoca spaziale. Vi lascio ad alcune note – in inglese – di un articolo a riguardo molto arguto, che tra le altre cose traccia l’inizio dell’innerspace floydiano contrapposto a quello che fino ad allora era stato il loro outerspace psichedelico sperimentale, riproponendo anche il brano in questione. Buon viaggio.

It was no surprise, then, that the BBC tapped Pink Floyd to appear on a special Apollo 11–themed episode of Omnibus titled, with perhaps with the slightest dearth of decorum, “So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?” This irreverent sentiment was reiterated in the middle of Pink Floyd’s performance of “Moonhead,” when an unidentified narrator breaks into the song to exclaim, “So they’re there, a quarter of a million miles away, up there on the moon, and early tomorrow morning they’ll step out and see once and for all if it’s green cheese or not”—referring to the fact that, in the wee hours of July 21, 1969, Armstrong would leave Homo sapiens’ first boot print on the moon, followed about 19 minutes later by Aldrin. For good measure, a young Judi Dench and a young Ian McKellen—pre-Dame and pre-Sir—read lighthearted poetry on the program.

The levity is understandable. Laughter was one way to deal with the very real possibility of failure—not to mention the existential enormity—that came with the Apollo 11 mission. Who were we, after all, to dare walk on the moon? It was a feat of hubris that echoed Icarus’s own. Amid all the triumphalism of Apollo 11’s anticipated success was a dark underside. A few jokes here and there helped keep spirits up, hence the raft of novelty songs that appeared at the time, from the psychedelic sound of “Man in the Moon” by the group Village to the hilariously twangy single “First Country Singer on the Moon” by Don Lewis.

The BBC’s suspense-puncturing quip about green cheese wasn’t enough to deflate the grandeur and mystique of “Moonhead.” Constructed of cosmic guitar effects, pulses of percussion, and Waters’s ominously descending bass line, it’s an eerie piece of improvisation that translates the breathtaking awe of the moon landing into music. Gilmour dismissed the song humbly as “a nice, spacey, atmospheric, 12-bar blues” that sounded “a bit off the wall,” but it’s much more than that. Presaging the ambient and new-age music movements that would come into their own in the ’70s, “Moonhead” is both ahead of its time and solidly a product of the moment—the zeitgeist caught in a vacuum tube.

Later, Gilmour realized the song’s place in history. “It brought it home to me, powerfully, that you could look up at the moon and there would be people standing on it,” he said. “It was fantastic to be thinking that we were in there making up a piece of music, while the astronauts were standing on the moon.” According to Gilmour, the song also marked a turning point for the band—the point at which outer space ceased to be Pink Floyd’s preoccupation.

“It didn’t have a significant impact on our later work,” Gilmour said of “Moonhead.” “I think at the time Roger, our lyricist, was looking more into going inwards, going into the inner space of the human mind and condition. And I think that was sort of the end of our exploration into outer space.” Once you’ve officially soundtracked the occasion of humanity’s first steps on another astronomical body, where do you go with space music? Even the band’s wildly successful 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, used lunar imagery as a metaphor for the inner condition rather than a subject in and of itself.

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