Two Lost Souls Swimming in a Fish Bowl...

So because I decided to analyze an album, Wish you were here for my first post of this kind, I decided to start with an analysis of each of the six songs with a link to the lyrics first and my analysis below.

https://sites.google.com/site/pinkfloydlyrics/wishyouwerehere

Thoughts/Analysis

Shine on you Crazy Diamond:

This song has a feel of fatalism, as well as an existential tilt. I relate it to the writings of Kierkegaard as the sang seems to intimate that who we are is determined by the dreams and thoughts we form, rather than what the world forces us to do or tells us we are. In the words Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Roger Waters calls upon us to work to shine and prove meaning of our own existence. I say it is fatalistic because he says to accept that the world will take from us what we hope and blow us on the "steel winds."

Welcome to the Machine

I don't really have anything to say about this one except its strongly anti industrial.

Have A Cigar

This song, like the last one ( and the next one) is very strongly Romantic. It rails against the common aspects of what we consider to be a futuristic society, specifically in this case the Capitalistic tendency to treat people as faceless individuals, just another cost or commodity.

Wish You Were Here

This song is again not only about how society is taking all the beauty away from the world and replacing it with ugly, unhappy images "a green field from a cold steel rail?" but it is also about how we are trapped in the world like fish in a fish bowl until we can finally break free, but not by what we can sense or see.

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

The album ends with part 2 (or parts 6-9) of shine on you crazy diamonds, with much the same tilt as the beginning.

Album

The album as a whole is very reminiscent of philosophical terms like Idealism, the opposite to materialism, where instead of focusing on what you can see and touch, its more of what you can reason out and experience(in a spiritual sense). Another thing that it is similar to is the existential movement, popularized by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche which is basically, the idea that who you are is determined by your actions, something that I wished Sophie was told before she was presented with the questions of unquestionable importance. However in wish you were here they touch upon the fishbowl, something which binds to earth, an idea discussed by many theologians, for example a Hindu would call it karma, the ties that bind us to the wheel of fate whereas a Christian would call it sin, the weights and tar which separates us from God. I don't know if this is relevant to philosophy or not but the entire album is very Romantic as a whole.

To be honest, this entire band would likely take offense to me analyzing their album and classifying it, and really I wasn't exactly sure what was going on, making connections where there may or may not be any.

Peace.