Connotation as driver of a song's staying power: "Breathe (In the Air)" by Pink Floyd

Some songs have connotations, and some songs with connotations do not owe their impact upon the listener (thus, also their success) to what it's official lyrics explicitly express. Often enough in contemporary music, a subliminal connotation arises out of linguistic intonation, yet intonation carries most of the weight in our communication. I've read several interpretations for this song and, even if the most conservative are compelling (i.e., the song is a fable regarding birth and what follows), they fail to clearly make sense of the very last stanza, which is the song's most powerful. Because the lyrics do not have proper punctuation, the stanza is ambiguous; moreover, several of the possible interpretations are conceptual opposites and mutually exclusive.

I find that the most compelling meaning is arrived at simply by reading the lyrics *as are heard* and adding the punctuation as correspond to the rules of English. Just see for yourself...





"Breathe! Breathe in the air.
Don't be afraid to care.
Leave, but don't leave me.
Look around; choose your own ground.

Long you live, and high you fly;
smiles you'll give, and tears you'll cry,
and all you touch—and all you see—
is all your life will ever be.

Run! Rabbit run!
Dig that hole. Get the sun.
And when at last the work is done,
don't sit down; it's time to dig another one.

Long you live, and high you fly.
But, only if you ride the tide
balanced on the biggest wave,
you race towards an early grave."


There are no typos above. The connotation of the song makes perfect sense even with "get the sun" in place of "forget the sun", though it definitely goes way deeper down the rabbit hole. Be that as it may, note that the last paragraph is a logical conditional (i.e., If X, then Y.), a fact that the vast majority will miss upon reading the lyrics but that your brain will nevertheless process it as such even if you aren't aware of it. As often occurs, it is the connotation, not the denotation, that leads to the song having the staying power that it has. The song isn't simply about being born and working yourself into an early grave.

I won't delve into the atmospheric aspect of this song, which is clearly the central subliminal message to it invoked most strongly by the terms "air", "sun", "tide", and "wave", though not only by these terms. Even if I would like to, I realize that the complexity of it alone may be nauseating to many of you. Nonetheless, I do want to point out that, once viewed as a type of literature, this particular piece begs to be grouped as a fable. The genre of the fable is defined by the work ending in a moral or life lesson. Even if how this particular moral of the story comes out directly from the prior stanzas cannot be wholly seen without considering the atmospheric metaphor that underlies it, the life lesson itself may be clearly comprehended precisely because it is framed in logic as a conditional.







The lesson is against the value of balance in order (or coherence, as opposed to imbalance or chaos within order, or balance within disorder or incoherence, or imbalance within incoherence). Exactly the same message is found in the celebrated poem "The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost" and also, though less obvious, in one of my favorite poems of all time. e.e. cummings' "now does our world descend".

For those of you who have a specific interest in the atmospheric metaphor, I will merely point you in the direction of a prior, brief musing I wrote long ago concerning the song "Reckoner" by Radiohead.

The album art for Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd 

depicts a green crystal-based pyramid acting as a prism

to produce the optical colors that we perceive.