Analysis of Pink Floyd's Animals
Uploaded by ccrfan747 on Jan 31, 2007
Pigs, Dogs, and Sheep
Released in 1977, the Pink Floyd album “Animals” was written mainly by bassist, lyricist, and composer, Roger Waters. All lyrics on the record were created by him, and he wrote or co-wrote all five songs on the album. While the record reached #3 on the Billboard U.S. Album charts, it fell very quickly, due to the length of each song. The songs are all either under two minutes long, or over ten minutes long. Animals is considered to be a “concept album”, which means that it contains a theme or story. In this album, the theme is analogies of animals to the types of people in society. Dogs represent greedy businessmen, pigs are wealthy and powerful people, and sheep symbolize the lower class in society, or the proletariat.
The first major song on “Animals”, “Dogs”, is a seventeen minute long ballad about businessmen whose whole lives revolve around their careers. Waters takes the voice of a dog, giving advice to other dogs about how to live. “You gotta sleep on your toes, and when you’re on the street. You gotta be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed,” Waters exclaims in the first few minutes of the song. As “Dogs” continues, the businessmen slowly destroy themselves by losing control of their lives. “So have a good drown, as you go down alone, dragged down by the stone.” Towards the end of the song, Waters repeatedly mocks the egotistical dogs, calling them “deaf, dumb and blind”, and claims that they pretend that “everyone’s expendable” and “no one has a real friend”. In the final lines of “Dogs”, there is a series of lines that tells the story of how these dogs live. The song ends with the line, “Who was dragged down by the stone,” and indicates that the dogs cannot survive the life of a businessman striving for money and power all of his life.
“Pigs (Three Different Ones)” follows “Dogs” on “Animals”, and refers to the rich, powerful men in society. They are similar to dogs, but they hold more power and are a step above on the social ladder. The first verse refers these people as charades, and mocks them with lyrics such as “Pig stain on your fat chin” and...