Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (1975)
After Activation - and the Problem of What Continues
There are records you remember discovering with precision. You can reconstruct the room, the equipment, the version of yourself that first encountered them. They announce their importance immediately, and your memory obliges by storing the event intact, timestamped.
Wish You Were Here doesn’t behave like that.
I don’t remember when I first heard it. I would have been somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, during those years when music was entering my life faster than I could explain why certain things mattered. What I’m reasonably certain of is that it came to me on a tape dub from one of my oldest friends, Peter. That detail has stayed with me—not because it’s dramatic, but because it feels right. This is not an album that arrives as a moment. It arrives as a condition.
That already places it differently from The Dark Side of the Moon. I’ve written about Dark Side recently as an album of activation—about systems announcing themselves loudly enough that we …
