Animals by Pink Floyd is my absolute favorite Floyd album and one of my favorite albums ever.  For me, this is the highlight of Pink Floyd week as I get to share a live performance of “Pigs on a Wing 1” as an intro to “Dogs,” my favorite Pink Floyd song.  Animals is Pink Floyd’s real masterpiece, with better songs then Dark Side of the Moon, and is way more thematically focused then The Wall.  Animals has 5 songs, with the intro “Pigs on a Wing 1,” being brought back at the end with slightly different lyrics, so its really 4 songs.  The record is mostly the work of Roger Waters, who at this point took full creative control of the band.  It’s a concept album loosely based on George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, mainly a railing against with the oppressive social-political of Great Britain.  The whole thing is a psychedelic progressive folk rock masterpiece.  It is also an angry finely manicured response to the emerging punk rock movement.  Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols famously wore an “I hate Pink Floyd,” t-shirt, and Roger Waters and company wanted to remind the punkers they too emerged from an underground movement determined to unmoor the uptight and conformist British hierarchy.  For “Dogs,” Waters wrote the lyrics, and Gilmour, in his only songwriting contribution to the record, wrote the music.  It was originally titled, “You’ve Got to Be Crazy,” and features some of Pink Floyd’s best lyrics and dynamic guitar solos.  It’s a piece of fantastic psychedelic dark funk, and demands worship.  So check out this live performance and go for the gold by sitting through the whole thing, its worth it.

Part 2 cannot be embedded, so just click this link to be taken to it on youtube.

Here is a clean recording of “Dogs,” but with no live footage.

As we have been progressing with chronological normality through Pink Floyd’s career during “Pink Floyd Week,” the video clips have matched the time in which the songs were produced.  Now that we have reached the seminal Pink Floyd record, Dark Side of the Moon, an album about madness and time, I figured we’d jump ahead several decades to see the guys rock “Money” at Live 8.  Because of Richard Wright’s death in 2008, this would represent the only full band reunion (sans Syd Barrett) that the world would ever see since Richard Wright left in 1979.  So, this is a rather historic performance, and a surprisingly relevant one given that Live 8 and Occupy Wall Street have similar philosophical roots.  It also goes without saying that the song “Money” is the ultimate ironic anthem on the subject of the crushing evil of greed.  It’s an awesome Roger Waters tune set to his greatest bass line.  I always thought Dark Side of the Moon was a continuation of the sonic ground broken by the Beatles on Abbey Road.  Lyrically and thematically, the two records have nothing in common, but there is such a high level of musical accomplishment and precision on both records.  The gapless linked tracks on Abbey Road were also a huge influence on Dark Side as well.  It actually should come as no surprise that both records share many musical similarities because they were both recorded at Abbey Road Studios with many of the same technicians and engineers that worked with the Beatles.  That’s enough Beatle/Pink Floyd comparisons, as I’ll have a more thorough analysis on the subject tomorrow.  Anyway, enjoy this thrilling rendition of “Money,” and make sure to click the ads on my site so I can put my hands on Google’s stack…Jack.