Shine Off You Crazy Diamond

Ever since the Russian military started the full-scale “liberation” of Ukraine, people and businessess started fleeing Russia. Many of these pull-outs make total sense, as an obvious way to weaken, economically and otherwise, the aggressor regime. Many pull-outs are an understandable reaction to the “counter-sanctions” that the Russian government replied with, forbidding the Russian businessess to pay in foreign currencies to any entities residing in the “hostile countries”: you may want to sell diapers and cancer medicines in Russia, but you don’t want to be paid in Roubles these days, do you?

Some of the pull-outs, however, are hardly good for anything but virtue signaling. Some even do more harm than good, hurting the opposition inside Russia much more than the regime supporters. Yet even those are understandable — somewhat. But yesterday, the outright absurd level was reached.

Of course, music is – by definition – entertainment, and, in many cases, a commercial enterprise, and therefore some reason for a pull-out can be fathomed. But good music – real music – is much more than that. It affects minds and mindsets. It is a beacon that can be seen by the most misguided of people. It has a potential of waking up something good in the darkest of souls. Real music is literally a manifestation of magic, and these are painfully scarse in our world. Not many things are powerful enough to stop wars. Good music is one of them.

People whose judgement I have grounds to respect tell me that music was a prominent tool in bringing the Soviet regime down. I believe it. Anyone exposed to the good music of the West could immediately see that a system that bans it and fails to produce anything comparable of its own must be seriously, perhaps fatally, flawed. Pink Floyd used to be one of the iconic names for people in the USSR, along with The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and several others. Pink Floyd made some real music, and it had the power to bring the Iron Curtain down.

To be fair, that was pre-1987 Pink Floyd. It is still available in Russia, let’s hope it can still do its magic. The world desperately needs it now.

And I guess we now know the exact year Pink Floyd turned from making real music to pure entertainment and commerce, at least in Pink Floyd’s own opinion.