G Rated Comments About the Relevance of Pink Floyd’s Animals Album:

@deadhead1000 

"Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events."

--Robert Heinlein

The link to Animal Farm is hardly tenuous at best, the only common denominator is animals. There is absolutely no link to Lord of the Flies.

Animals is seething with hate and misplaced trust after Floyd were scammed and forced to become tax-exiles, after being the unwilling victims of a complex scam perpetrated by the venture capitalists Norton Warburg, run by Andrew Warburg.

Basically it's about losing one's faith in human nature "and the people that you lie to, when they turn their back on you, you'll get the chance to put the knife in".

Animals also reflects the band's despondency with the majority of the population that just - suck it up - Sheep.

Whitehouse is not "The White House" but a fervent morality campaigner of the day in Britain - Mary Whitehouse.

The conceptual roles of Dogs, sheep and pigs is a pretty cynical yet powerful analogy for the dark model of human civilization these days and pretty much always.

Think yin/yang. There is a dark and bright side to everything and we all get choose how we play the game. Star Wars took that concept and brought it home for many.

Loved “Animals” when it came out and it has aged well.

I’m a dog lover. Pigs ain’t kosher….not for me. Sheep are fine down on the farm and just want to be left alone

Loved “Animals” when it came out and it has aged well.

"And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around...." - always loved that line.... 

@larsman Great line.  

The relevance of the album’s ideas to our current state of affairs: 

Selfishness, greed, entitlement, and a lack of respect for life obviously define the Western World today.  
- corporate dominance at the expense of human dignity
- crushing and punishing the poor
- inhumane work/living/housing conditions
- lack of health care
- prioritizing the power of the NRA over the rights of children to attend school without being mass murdered.  
- prioritizing the wealth of a tiny fraction of Earth’s population (oil companies) over addressing the fact that the entire human race may not be able to live on Earth a few hundred years from now

Not a lot of respect for life here.

- prioritizing the wealth of Tech Bros over addressing the abominable conditions facing millions of poor people
- prioritizing the wealth of universities and capitulating to the entitlement of their customers (formerly known as students) over actually educating the population
- tribal behavior that punishes any person in draconian fashion who speaks in any way remotely outside of a narrow dogmatic corridor of language/thought (this goes for both sides of the aisle), i.e., “just shut up and be a sheep like the rest of us, and you won’t get hurt”

Yeah, I think a lot of the stuff is just as relevant now as ever.