More
More is a fascinating album. So fascinating, I'm actually not sure if i'll even talk about the music in this essay. It's the soundtrack to More, the film about Ibiza's heroin crisis. The prop drugs in the film are real, cause why buy stuff when the cast and crew can just empty their pockets? The soundtrack is not real, or is real but isn't a standard soundtrack. It's a Pink Floyd album made by watching scenes from the movie and timing them with a stopwatch so they would fit into the scenes of the movie like they were just playing in real life. Pink Floyd didn't have sync studio money, and Barbet Schroeder wanted contemporary European music playing when a character flipped on a radio, or a tv, or put on a record, or sat in an office with loudspeakers, or whatever. So, it's a newly Syd Barrett-less Pink Floyd album inspired by Barbet Schroeder's images of 60s narcotic induced free love on an autonomous island that technically belongs to Spain. Long story short, Stefan couldn't handle Guns 'N Roses levels of heroin and died, and Nazis are still a thing. I'm not known for agreeing with Roger Ebert, because he graduated from the school of "my opinion equals the director's intent," so i find it hard to believe Schroeder was actually saying let's all go to the lobby and find a dirty syringe. I suspect it was a much more boring moral about moderation and temptation that he had in mind.
If you'd rather watch scenes from the movie while listening to one of my favorite Coil tracks, Careful What You Wish For because i can give you that option:
https://youtu.be/O_Vt43hHQw0
I'm going to stick to the script and just listen to it as a Pink Floyd concept album, the concept being make some music to fit what real life music should be playing during this scene. According to my own peculiar brand of Structuralism, whatever i come up with should bear some fundamental resemblance to what the Floyd were thinking at the time. Or not, i'm just as happy to be wrong.
Yeah, you need the context of a soundtrack. It doesn't have to be this film, it just has to be about some observable clash of cultures. Nature vs. noir, folk vs. party rock, acoustic vs. electric, it's all an entry way into that world of cinema: the real and the depiction of the supposedly real refusing to blend together like peaches and gravy. You're gonna give me a weird look, but it could just as easily be the soundtrack of Harold and Maude. 2 minutes in and you know it won't have a happy ending, you just don't know how we're going to get there; funny from a certain macabre perspective, but definitely not cathartic.
Look at it from both sides, like Joni Mitchell told you to do. It's not Pink Floyd, it's Pink Floyd's version of the world in the late 60s. Rational working class English musicians writing the music for how the rest of the world experiences Pink Floyd. Is it middle eastern music, or the american surf guitar version of middle eastern music? The real world can't tell if it's silly or sinister, i can't tell if it's silly or sinister, so it must be that both exist simultaneously, or neither are true. Perhaps reality lies somewhere in that murky middleground where you are what you eat, and more isn't necessarily better. Fun to listen to, though.
Ummagumma
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