It’s funny how the context of my life alters my perception.
I was heavily into Pink Floyd during my formative high school years. Being a young male, my hubris conned me into believing that everything must be about me, including the heavy subject matter of Pink Floyd’s concept albums.
Wish You Were Here provides a fine example.
As a young man, I was deeply skeptical of The Man and all of the institutions that keep us down. What I see now was a child who was so afraid of his dreams and, more importantly, of doing the work it takes to make those dreams come true, that he would shun the very institutions that would help him achieve those dreams.
Welcome To the Machine was a metaphor I clung to as I ventured from high school to college. I saw my life as a piece of meat caught in the grinder between suburbia and the working world. The Machine was a factory job or a slow death under fluorescent bulbs in an office building, and the song was a frightening siren-song goading me to assimilate into the workforce.
My father became a symbol of one who had been enslaved by the machine, weighted down by familial and financial responsibility. With adulthood looming on the horizon, I disliked what I saw in my father, though now having shed some of the distorted youthful filter clouding my vision I understand my father’s choices and I feel remorse for villifying him.
Lyrics that didn’t really fit my situation were twisted in my head to become applicable to my life:
You dreamed of a big star
What kid doesn’t want to be a rock star?
He played a mean guitar
I played instruments and I wanted to play a mean one for sure
Always ate in the steak bar
I liked steak!
Loved to drive in his Jaguar
Hey my dad had a Jaguar! This must be about me!
I listen to this album now and I don’t feel that it applies to my life at all. Sure, there are some themes that are universal, but the album is really about a single person and his experience in the music industry. I find the album much more enjoyable, and actually more deep, when I don’t personalize it.