Interpretation
I can’t precisely remember when I first heard Pink Floyd’s
album The Wall. I do know that the first time I heard it in
its entirety was with a friend of mine named Bishop. He and I listened to the tape late one night
in his room. The songs were obviously a
narrative, but a narrative of what exactly we couldn’t tell. And with much rewinding and turning the
volume as high as we could to hear what strange things were being said in the
background hiss between songs, we created a story to match the music.
It was, of course, completely wrong.
But the effort was one that prompted me to think of music as
narrative – as having meaning beyond the straight lyrics and finding influence
in guitar riffs and bass lines, syncopation and even volume.
And I found out that our story was wrong when I saw the
movie version of the Wall. Three friends
and I watched it one Saturday night. By
the time the first fifteen minutes had passed, two of my friends were fast
asleep. The other two of us were draw
into the movie, which was like nothing I had ever seen before. Suddenly the story of the music and the lyrics
were vividly brought to life. I was
profoundly shaken by the visuals of the movie, but I was also inspired. What inspired me was the recognition that the
work from the depths of someone’s soul could produce wondrous creations, and
they could speak to the depths of someone else’s soul.
After the movie was over, the tape ran out, rewound itself
and the television sat with a blue screen. My friend and I sat transfixed, consumed by
the movie and lost in thought.
I have often wondered, though, if the story that Bishop and
I came up with wasn’t also right. I said we were completely wrong, but that was
only after we saw the movie. While the
movie was unbelievable, what if what he and I came up with that night was also
somehow legitimate? Having nothing to go on but the music, what he
and I heard had perhaps as much validity as anything else.
What a dangerous idea!
In his book The Year of Living Biblically, A.J.
Jacobs talks about trying to come to terms with what the Bible means.
His plan was to try and follow the laws of the Bible as literally as
possible. To do that, he opened up the
Bible and started reading and trying to see where it would lead him. What is so telling is what happens when he
explains his project to people. After
telling his aunt (who is an Orthodox Jew) what he was intending to do, he
writes the following:
“It’s misguided. You
need the oral law. You can’t just obey
the written law. It doesn’t make sense
without the oral law.” By this, his aunt
means that he can’t understand the written
law in the Hebrew Scriptures without the oral law (compiled by Rabbis in works
like the Talmud). So for the scriptures
to make sense, you have to have an interpretive lens. Likewise, when Jacobs talked to Christians, “They
said I couldn’t truly understand the Bible without accepting the divinity of
Christ. They said that many of these
laws – like the ones about animal sacrifice – were nullified by Jesus’ death.”[1]
In other words, you can’t make sense of it until someone
makes sense of it for you. So did I not understand Pink Floyd’s album The Wall until I saw the movie (which is
a pretty questionable thing as the movie is pretty wild)? Or did I have an interpretation of the album and
the movie is also an interpretation? Is the movie the only understanding?
Like the Bible, do I need an interpretation before the music
has meaning, or do we have to have a proper understanding first? I wonder.
Because in the case of the Bible, is there no possibility that it can be
read by someone who finds meaning in it without
the church, the rabbis, or some set of interpretive lenses?
Food for thought, I suppose.
So let me end with this.
Several years after hearing The Wall, I purchased the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Still one of my favorites, I was (and still find myself) caught up in
its music.
On an airplane flight, I read an article that ‘interpreted’
the album. I remember that the article
said that the whole album was about the music industry and the machine that can
so bog down artists. Now, if this
article had been about the Pink Floyd album Wish
You Were Here, I would have agreed.
But Dark Side of the Moon? No way.
It is about death, dying, and the human condition of mortality. Perhaps it is even about going crazy.[2]
Of course, I could be wrong.
[1] Both of these quotes are found in A.J. Jacob’s
book The Year of Living Biblically on page 12. The version I cite is the paperback edition published
by Simon and Shuster Paperbacks in 2008.
[2] There is some bizarre connection to the movie The Wizard
of Oz, too, but I won’t get into that right now.
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