Pink Floyd - "Us and Them"

Rhetorical Appeals

Pink Floyd does a great job of creating lyrics that tug on your emotions in the song "Us and Them." Their opening line is "Us and Them," creating dissonance in the listeners mind by separating two sides. In their very next line "And after all we're only ordinary men," they resolve this dissonance by rejoining these two sides, saying everyone is just human. What they mean is that there really isn't anything separating us and we should all realize that at our core, we are all the same. This united feeling we get when we hear the lyrics is part of the pathos intended in their song. "Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died." But yet, we still fight wars with each other, and take orders from men who watch from the safety of the back lines. And for what good reason? Here they break the resonance with the realization that everyday people fight in wars for reasons they don't even know exist, they just take orders from their general without having a second thought, again driving at our emotions. Even though we are the same, we still fight one another. "Up and down, and in the end its only round and round and round." What Pink Floyd is saying is that the war is pointless. Soldiers fight day in and day out giving their lives to their country, but in the end we have not gained anything or solved any problems. All wars start and end the same, with people dead on both sides. Not only do the lyrics grab our emotions but they also make sense. The logos in the song calls to our sense of a common goal. People are just trying to survive and get through life the best they can. War goes directly against this goal, it forces people to kill one another and it creates sadness and distress. Not only is it unethical to fight war, it is also illogical, as it goes against our human need to survive. Pink Floyd wants people to realize this and to think that we are more than just cannon fodder, we are living, breathing men. We all have the love of humanity in our hearts, we don't hate, at least we weren't born to hate.