While working today, I had on Pink Floyd's Animals, probably the least known of the band's classic run. The other three are Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here. I wouldn't count The Wall because the band began its long, slow breakup during the recording of it. It's more a Roger Waters project featuring members of Pink Floyd.
The album's premise is there are three types of people in the world: "Dogs," who are go-getters, predators, and pack animals; "Pigs-Three Different Ones"-in which the rich and powerful shove their snouts in the trough to the exclusion of everyone else who needs to feed; and "Sheep." The last is self-explanatory.
But it's "Pigs…" That strikes me as the most, well, criminally oriented. "Dogs" depicts someone who is ambitious, aggressive, and greedy, but is eventually brought down by everything they attain. "Sheep," of course, while musically being the best song on the album, is yet another screed telling us that all is hopeless for the common man. But "Pigs…"? The all-consumer elites are a staple of noir, hardboiled, and thrillers.
Waters is vague in his first verse. It's the rich and greedy in general. To me, Lex Luthor of Superman fame is a classic example. Since the nineties, he's been a billionaire of various stripes, the most recent movie making him the classic tech bro with absolutely no compassion or sense of responsibility and utterly self-absorbed. Nicholas Hoult plays Luthor as a nuanced, but clearly evil, villain. You understand him, and that only makes you want to punch him in the throat harder. Last week's industrial fat cat is yesterday's media mogul is today's tech bro.
Waters gets more specific with verse 2, which is openly about Margaret Thatcher without naming her. But I think it applies more to today, where the demagogue (which Thatcher was not, though I get why people might disagree) has become a new low in leadership around the world. But even they are common villains in and out of crime: the corrupt politician or sheriff, the real estate mogul squeezing his tenants. Kingpin from the Marvel franchise is a great example. In more recent versions, he's not even a supervillain. He's the son of an abusive gangster who's actually trying to rise above his past, but that pesky Daredevil keeps messing up his illegal efforts. Vincent D'Onofrio, like Hoult, makes Kingpin much more nuanced. He's a lonely man trying to rebuild a neighborhood. We even see him meet his wife and show a human side. But he is a villain. He doesn't hesitate to use his father's tactics to get what he wants.
Waters names names in his third verse, going after moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, the subject of a LOT of satirical lyrics in British rock back in the 1970s. Whitehouse, while having a rather cheerful demeanor, was described as the classic definition of a puritan: Lying awake at night worried someone somewhere was having fun.
If you want to see a real-life version of this, look no further than Cincinnati's own Simon Leis, a man who tried to frame Barnes & Noble as selling porn to minors, then having a temper tantrum on the radio when the county prosecutor simply told the offending store, "Oh, just put that magazine behind the counter with the Playboys and Penthouses." Leis's most infamous act was to attempt to shut down the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum of Contemporary Art. It went to trial for obscenity. The museum, in famously conservative Hamilton County, Ohio, won. But Leis had a long history of such behavior. His attack on Larry Flynt was depicted in The People Vs. Larry Flynt (with Flynt playing the judge in that scene.)
So there you have it, a classic album about three types of people who pathologically can't understand other people don't like being told what to do.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to be watching for Pigs on the Wing.
