Brad Smith
MOON8
self-released, March 2010
Download it or listen to it on YouTube here
Phil RetroSpector
“Crying for Us and Them”
from Mashed in Plastic: The David Lynch Mash-Up Album (bonus track)
1086 Productions, November 2008
I came to The Dark Side of the Moon late. Not until I was a junior in college, if I recall correctly, did countless comparisons with OK Computer finally prompt me to pick up a copy. So I have no smoky adolescent memories of listening the record in stoned and reverent awe in someone’s parents’ basement. Nor in someone’s dorm room, for that matter–by the time I got around to Dark Side I expect most of my running buddies had long since made their peace with the record. If you wanna talk about chemically enhanced communal journeys deep into the heart of Kool Keith’s Sex Style, I’m your guy, but my experience with Pink Floyd’s career-defining record has been mostly solitary, mostly sober, and mostly grown-up.
Indeed, the older I get, the more I listen to it, and the more it clicks with me. This is an album about the passage of time, the fear of failure, the drive to succeed, armchair warriors, mental illness, and death–about, in other words, my life over the past few years. And it’s not just that “The Great Gig in the Sky” sounds very different when you’ve gone through three consecutive miscarriages, though I promise it does, it’s that with age I can appreciate not just the relentlessly bleak lyrics but the intelligence of the music in which they’re packaged. One of the last great flourishings of true psychedelia–not a cheesy retro formless paisley swirl, but an overwhelming, all-encompassing onslaught of aural information–The Dark Side of the Moon‘s sound seems inexhaustible. Layer upon layer of studio wizardry and improvisatory instrumental prowess surround (mostly) simple rhythms, almost childlike melodies, and of course the disarmingly direct lyrics, cushioning the blow and making the darkness almost comforting. It’s an album to cling to, and that clings to you.
Lately I’ve listened a lot to a pair of Internet-based projects that run Dark Side through the prism of very of-the-moment musical…well, trends, you could call them, or gimmicks, or even parlor tricks given their inherently playful nature. Created first as a hobby and then as a birthday present, Brad Smith’s MOON8 is a chiptunes cover of The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Smith transforms the Floyd’s lush, atmospheric, (ah, the hell with it) Floydian approach into the squeaky, squelchy sound of an 8-bit Nintendo-game soundtrack. This is really really easy to appreciate on a Tumblr-meme level, of course: Pink Floyd is awesome, Nintendo games are awesome, making Pink Floyd sound like a Nintendo game is a veritable double-rainbow of awesome. One level up, and (as Smith points out) it’s a fun way to extrapolate the coincidental similarity between old game soundtracks and the proto-programming loops of “On the Run.” One level past that, and it’s a clever blend of two traditionally communal experiences: Playing video games with your friends as a kid, and listening to Dark Side in a group–in Smith’s case, with his family. One level past that, and it’s a juxtaposition of the nostalgia of your childhood (Nintendo) with the nostalgia of your adolescence or young adulthood (discovering Floyd), which in all likelihood was a recapitulation of your parents’ adolescence or young adulthood (the original audience for Floyd).
None of that would matter, however, if the music didn’t end up being so surprisingly interesting. “I like the challenge of making something large fit into a small space,” Smith told Wired. “How much expression can you get from just the three oscillators of the NES?” Certainly a big part of the pleasure of MOON8 is discovering how your favorite sounds from the original album are going to be translated into the music of Mario and company, from the power-up and coin sounds that become the cash-register noises at the beginning of “Money” to the explosions and lasers (sorry, it’s hard not to hear it that way) that replace the big epic backing vocals on “Us and Them.” But reducing peak-of-their-powers David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright to whatever you can fit into the rudimentary tools of the FamiTracker reveals as much as it replaces. “Breathe” becomes a cheeky, bouncy pseudo-funk track halfway between the Head Hunters version of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” and the underground music from Super Mario Bros.; “Time” starts like a quest and ends like a losing battle. With so few distractions, the singsongy quality of Dark Side‘s simple melodies–as simple and timeless as “Ring Around the Rosey”–comes through, unveiling a heretofore hidden aspect of the original album’s power.
“Crying for Us and Them” is in a way a similar process of addition through subtraction, coupled with addition through plain-old addition. Created by Phil RetroSpector for Mashed in Plastic, an all-mash-up David Lynch tribute album, it combines David Ari Leon’s piano-only cover of “Us and Them” (from one of those countless “Piano Tribute to…” cash-in albums) with Rebekah Del Rio’s gutwrenching Spanish-language a cappella cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” “Llorando,” from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Once again, this is some wheels-within-wheels stuff: A cover that translates a song from one musical idiom to another, coupled with a cover that translates another song from one language to another, combined to create a new song, which is itself a tribute to the pivotal scene in a movie preoccupied with doubles, shifting identities, personal re-creation, and the flimsy boundary between the real and the unreal. And oh, right, there are the original lyrics to “Us and Them”: “And who knows which is which and who is who?”
But here, again, beyond the conceptual hijinx, something interesting is being revealed about the music. Lyrically, “Us and Them” is a song about conflict, about the powerful fucking over the powerless, in no uncertain terms. “‘Forward!’ they cried from the rear, and the front rank died”–as blunt and angry a description of war as you’re likely to find, especially considering that given Waters’ history the war he likely had in mind was the Good War itself, World War II. But musically, isn’t it romantic? That gentle groove, that crooning saxophone, that piano like an inviting breeze…the first time I heard this song, off one of my dad’s LPs back in middle school, I put it on a mix for the girl I liked, thinking it’d be a great song to make out to. In that regard it’s probably the clearest articulation of Dark Side‘s project of using warm, intoxicating music to say awful things. “Crying for Us and Them” takes advantage of Leon’s bare, pretty arrangement to reinvent “Us and Them” as a love song for real, only it’s now layered with the vocals of perhaps the most devastating lost love song ever recorded. A personal apocalypse on par with any of the Big Questions tackled by Dark Side–one just as tied to adult failure and regret. I was alright for a while, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.