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Pink Floyds Song For Dogs Essay

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In order to fully comprehend Pink Floyds song “Dogs” one also has to look at the album in its entirety. “Animals” is at its core a critique of capitalism and it´s inherent forced conformity. The album is made up of three main songs plus and intro and an outro. “Dogs, Pigs and Sheep”. The names are metaphors for positions in society filled by the common citizen. Sheep being meek, dumb and easily led by an authority, pigs being fat and greedy and dogs being competitive opportunists.
The song “Dogs” compares successful capitalists to dogs, ferocious beasts rather than the loyal companions. The song is structured as a sort of conversation between a young and an older, more experienced counterpart, done by having two different vocalists performing their respective sections. The song starts by the older dog describing …show more content…

Sometimes it seems to me as if I’m just being used.
Gotta stay awake, gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise.
If I don’t stand my own ground,
How can I find my own way out of this maze?
He has realized the shallowness of a capitalistic lifestyle and sees through the axiom which dictates that power and wealth are the most important things in life. They are not worth losing ones morality for. This axiom or ideology was described by Karl Marx in his “Communist manifesto” as “false consciousness”. We accept the way things are just because they happen to be like so, and what is familiar, is safe. The song reaches it climax at the end, both in a musical and a lyrical sense. The lyrical conclusion is executed with quite literal lines such as:
Who was trained not to spit in the fan.
Who was told what to do by the man.
Who was broken by trained personnel.
Who was fitted with collar and chain. _ Who was dragged down by the stone.
These phrases represent forced conformity and ideological ideas which will eventually drag one down, all of which spawned by our capitalist

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