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BY LUIS BUENAFLOR JR.
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Monday, February 6, 2017
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Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
is there anyone at home?
Come on now
I hear you’re feeling down
Well I can ease your pain
Get you on your feet again
Relax
I’ll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?
— David Gilmour, Roger Waters
PROBABLY one of the most iconic and popular songs from that English psychedelic and progressive rock group Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb is arguably running a close second to The Wall, the unofficial anthem of the band.
Although that is open to debate which song is Pink Floyd, one cannot help but agree that Comfortably Numb has the edge and I do tend to concur. According to www.thewallanalysis.com/comfortably–numb:
“For many fans, Comfortably Numb is the quintessential Pink Floyd song. The brilliant musical arrangements, haunting guitar solos, ethereal vocals and sweeping lyrics illustrate just why this band is considered one of the best in the history of rock music. Yet not only is the song an important number in the Floyd catalogue but it is also arguably one of the most important songs in terms of both narrative and theme.”
Comfortably Numb is about Pink, an embittered and alienated rock star. This song compares Pink’s memories of being feverishly ill as a child with his feeling nothing at all in adulthood. The lyrics feature interplay between a doctor treating the adult Pink (verses, sung by Roger Waters) and Pink’s inner monologue (chorus, sung by David Gilmour).
Still from www.thewallanalysis.com/comfortably–numb, the song Comfortably Numb can be described in a sentence and I quote: “Pink’s emotional journey into the past is both interrupted and heightened when his management breaks into the hotel room and has a doctor inject him with a drug that will snap him out of his drug-induced malaise, ensuring that he can still perform at a concert later that evening.
“Comfortably Numb begins with a moody bass, Spartan drum beat, and wavering guitars, a musical representation of Pink’s drifting consciousness and his hazy realization of being spoken to from both outside of his mental wall and inside the physical one of his hotel room.
“While David Gilmour’s first guitar solo in Comfortably Numb is effortlessly paced, dreamlike in the phrases that develop out of his long, sustained notes – an appropriate reflection of the simultaneously searching yet surreal state Pink is in – the second guitar solo is noticeably more embattled, with most of the licks alternating between the guitar’s higher and lower registers.”
Yes folks, the song is about “substance abuse “or the effects of drugs both physically and mentally on a person who has an overdose.
But we are not here to discuss the good or bad even the moral or immoral effects of “substance abuse”; we leave that to President Rodrigo Duterte and Bishop Socrates Villegas. We are here to talk about the metaphors of the song and it’s parallel with our existence.
Our existence or life, as some of us prefer to call it, is never easy because if it is then you’re probably high or dead. Life is always a constant struggle each day not just to stay alive but to live and not just exist.
Some of us need to “stop the world and get off” to get by while some just shrug it off and take it in stride.
There are others who just take it all in because there’s “nothing else to do but close their mind.”
And then there are some that can best be described by the rest of the lyrics of Comfortably Numb:
There is no pain you are receding.
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
the child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.
I suppose in more ways than one moi can identify and perhaps belong to this incongruous mixture./PN
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