01	Pigs on the wing						01:25
	02	Dogs						17:04
	03	Pigs (Three Different Ones)						11:21
	04	Sheep						10:23
	05	Pigs on the wing 2						01:24

CXK 53180/ CK 53186
Part of the 8-CD Set "Shine On"
1992 Pink Floyd Music Ltd./ 1977 Pink Floyd Music Ltd.

Released January 23 1977.

Produced by The Pink Floyd

Recorded at Britannia Row Studios, London.

All lyrics by Roger Waters

Track Listing:

1) Pigs On The Wing part 1 (Waters)
2) Dogs (Waters, Gilmour)
3) Pigs (Three Different Ones) (Waters)
4) Sheep (Waters)
5) Pigs On The Wing part 2 (Waters, Gilmour, Wright)



Tentative Review #16
Pink Floyd
Animals
(released 1977)

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Track: Rating:
1. Pigs On The Wing (part one)
2. Dogs
3. Pigs (Three Different Ones)
4. Sheep
5. Pigs On The Wing (part two)

Personnel:
David Gilmour: lead guitar, (bass guitar?), vocals
Nick Mason: drums
Roger Waters: bass guitar, vocals, lyrics
Richard Wright: keyboards


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Comments:
Animals has somewhat of a curious place in the Pink Floyd legacy. One would normally expect that an album released between Wish You Were Here and The Wall in PF's output would be ranked with their best material, and would be an regarded by all fans as an integral part of the group's development. Instead, devotion to this album seems to be reserved to hardcore fans only, and the Floyd themselves have not performed any material from Animals in several years. Moreover, no songs from this album have become regular staples of "classic rock" stations (and the inclusion of "Sheep" on the Collection Of Great Dance Songs compilation seems to be little more than a token affirmation of the album's mere existence). Aside from the hardcore fanbase, the album seems to be generally ignored.

What can explain this? Part of the problem may be that there are no "classic rock" tracks on the album to follow the tradition of "Money" and "Have A Cigar" -- "Pigs" may come close, but, at ten minutes, it was stretching the limits of 1977 radio somewhat. "Sheep", also at ten minutes, doesn't really come close either -- and "Dogs", at 17 minutes, is even further removed from this standard. Many of the "rank and file" modern Floyd fans, in search of tracks on the level of "Comfortably Numb" and "Wish You Were Here", might find little reason to bother collecting this work.

Even among prog fans, however, the work is often regarded as somewhat peripheral... and, indeed, the album itself must take some of the blame for this. The individual songs, judged only on their own merit, are fine... but as a whole, the album lacks some of the impact of previous PF works. Where Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here both suffered slightly from tracks which marred the thematic development ("Money", "Welcome To The Machine"), Animals suffers from a thematic development which is at once too obvious and too vague to last for an entire album. The album, in spite of the individual tracks, is only a half-success.

The basic concept of the album is fairly simple: the pigs are the oppressors, the sheep are the oppressed, and the dogs are the ones used by the pigs to keep the sheep "in line". Eventually, the sheep overthrow the dogs (without, of course, removing the real oppressors). The metaphor of class struggle is too obvious to be elaborated on (Waters, himself of the English middle class, appears as a reluctant "dog" throughout the album, eventually becoming fully aware of his status in the final track). Not (ahem) the most original theme imaginable, perhaps, but not so overwrought as to ruin the course of the album. Unfortunately, the plot development of the characters is necessarily limited by the archetypal nature of animals in question -- aside from the "reluctant dog" sections, there isn't terribly much in the way of character development here. Perhaps this explains Waters's decision to create the extremely personal narrative that eventually emerged as The Wall .

As regards the individual tracks...

The three primary works are bookended by "Pigs On The Wing", a fairly simple mix of strummed acoustic guitar and Waters's earnest-though-vague vocals. The introductory piece obviously isn't a highlight of the album, but it's short, concise, and obviously just a "lead-in" for that which follows.

"Dogs", beginning with a rhythm line vaguely similar to "Another Brick In The Wall", is easily the best track on the album. Gilmour's guitar lines in the middle of the track compare well from his other work in this period, and the bass line prior to the "Who was..." section are highly recommended as well (though I have to wonder who actually played them). Wright's keyboards never really do anything overly complex in this track, though they are granted a brief "texture" spotlight after the line, "dragged down by the stone". As regards lyrics... it might not be overly presumptuous to argue that these are the unrelentingly grim of Waters's entire career. Gilmour's second-person vocals are absolutely condemnatory; Waters, singing from the first-person, can only respond by realizing his frustration in the face of his position. This in, in general, an excellent track. If only it had a proper home...

"Pigs (Three Different Ones)" isn't quite as good, due mostly to a somewhat inappropriate Frampton-esque vocoder/guitar section, which comes off as overly gimic-driven. Aside from this, though, the song remains generally worthwhile -- more condemnatory lyrics match with a somewhat bluesy jam, obviously leading to a guitar solo towards the end. Credit must also be given to the drum mixing on this track. Not quite a "classic" PF track, but not too far removed either.

"Sheep", the last of the main tracks, falls somewhere between the other two in terms of quality. Although beginning on a strong note with a vaguely jazzy keyboard section, the music seems somewhat unfocused in the later parts of the song -- this is a minor problem, but a problem nonetheless. Waters's vocal effects are appropriate for the track -- on the other hand, the lyrics are somewhat underdeveloped (one might argue that Waters was attempting to write from a somewhat naive position as regards the characters in question, but this would be more than slightly disingenious). The instrumental section towards the end is overly dependent on the rhythm parts, but is still good. In general, it's a triumph -- just not an overwhelming one.

The final "Pigs On The Wing" ends the album on a slightly unsatisfying note. It works as a resolution of the original theme, and of the concept of the album in general... but, ultimately, Waters's disappointed contentment in his own private space is somewhat of a "false climax" to the work in general.

This album cannot thus be strongly recommended to casual PF fans, or to prog fans in general. Those who do purchase the album may find much of interest, but the album cannot be considered to be "essential".

The Christopher Currie
(review originally posted to alt.music.yes on 17 June 1997)









Dogs
Composed By Gilmour/Pink Floyd/Pink Floyd/Waters
Performed By Pink Floyd
Length 17:08
Appears On Animals [1977]


AMG REVIEW: There's no doubt that 1977's Animals was one of Pink Floyd's most cryptic and intricate albums, even though critics tend to place it at the bottom of their list. The parallel to George Orwell's Animal Farm is pure genius, especially when all the conceptual layers are peeled off and the comparisons of the song's animal characters are matched with that of mankind and human society. From this album came the 17-minute masterpiece "Dogs," where the guitar lines sprouted from a song entitled "You Got to Be Crazy," which Pink Floyd played live in the early '70s during the Dark Side of the Moon tour. Even the lyrics are closely related, but were eventually changed to coincide with the rest of the album's framework. Written by both Gilmour and Waters, the song touches on the ruthlessness of the big businessman who lives to crush those beneath him in order to climb the corporate ladder, only to find out that he will die a sad and lonely man. Musically, the song is made up of numerous effects and sequencer pieces involving barking dogs and echoed guitar chords. With the help of a Vocoder, the barks were processed through a speaker in order to achieve such a haunting quality. Both Waters and Gilmour take turns singing the lyrics, and the song was never recorded or performed in concert but was resurrected on Roger Waters' 2000 live album, In the Flesh. The last stanza of "Dogs" involves numerous questions beginning with "Who," reminiscent of the famous poem entitled Howl by Allen Ginsberg. These questions point the finger at the shallowness of the selfish "dog" who eventually reaps the greed and evil that he sows. The songs from Animals were never a friend to radio, but the album stands as one of Pink Floyd's most immersed and engrossing outputs. "Dogs" carries the most weight out of the album's five songs, both lyrically and rhythmically. - Mike DeGagne


Pigs (Three Different Ones)
Composed By Roger Waters
Performed By Pink Floyd
Length 11:28
Appears On Animals [1977]


AMG REVIEW: Upon Animals' release in 1977, many critics dismissed the album, claiming it was a musically lethargic effort, void of any instrumental surge or appeal, especially in comparison to Pink Floyd's previous release, 1975's Wish You Were Here. Not only did the music itself take flack, but Water's microcosmic allegory based on George Orwell's Animal Farm was deemed overly dark and convoluted, and he was blamed for getting too carried away with his own paranoia and sociopolitical views. While critics weren't too far off in their judgments, Animals still had a firm Floyd-ian feel running through it, led by Gilmour's sluggish guitar lines and Waters' bleak but quite ingenious parallelisms. The album may not have had the abstractness or extended instrumental scope of Dark Side of the Moon or the musical range and sincere emotion of Wish You Were Here, but it still found ways to appeal to longtime fans, but not to too many beyond the Floyd faithful.
Broken up into three main parts, Animals dissects the world into three different types. The dogs represent the smarmy corporate cutthroats of society. Relentless and unprincipled, they trust no one and can never be trusted themselves. The pigs are the tyrannical leaders of the world, greedy, power hungry, and full of fear, while the sheep denote the exploited masses who are unaware and practically oblivious to all that occurs by the higher-ups. Played as a whole, the album does unravel quite nicely, and Waters' intricate parable is indeed deep but equally effectual. Out of the three main segments, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is the strongest and most flagrant, revealing Waters' deep-rooted liberal views, his distaste for absolute power, and his abhorrence for even the slightest right-wing slant.

Like the album itself, "Pigs" is triple tiered, with each verse pointing a finger at a certain type of fear-laden personality. The first pig that's revealed is the deceitful businessman, the hypocritical and collusive self-proclaimed superior who feels he can cheat and persuade his way to the top. Outlining Waters' revulsion of conservatism and the elite, it's this first stanza that paints a clear picture for the rest of the song and, to some extent, sums up a great part of Animals' conceptual purpose.

In the second verse, Waters gets a little more personal, but in more of a circuitous manner. Here he mentions the "bus stop rat bag" who "radiates cold shafts of broken glass" and is "hot stuff with a hat pin." Although unclear at the time, these references had to do with the up-and-coming political figure Margaret Thatcher, who was at that time a leading member of England's Conservative Party but eventually came into power as Britain's Prime Minister, thus making Waters' deepest fears and premonitions a reality.

The third reference is by far the harshest; a stern lambasting of Mary Whitehouse; a staunch English conservative and meddling advocate for censorship who was a predominant figure throughout the United Kingdom in the mid- and late '70s especially. It's here that Waters' fiercest remarks surface, asking her if she "feels abused" and accusing her of stemming the evil tide while trying to "keep our feelings off the street." Amongst the whole of Animals' symbolisms and enigmatic themes, it is here that Waters is at his most explicit and apparent. The song itself ends up being the most lyrically biting, and Waters' fears about the kind of Britain which was slowly evolving were slowly becoming a reality. "Pigs" may have confirmed his paranoia, but there's no denying that his accounts are discerning and strikingly astute.

With Gilmour's electronic squawk box imitating the haunting sound of a squealing pig, the music throughout "Pigs" becomes instantly trumped by its lyrical content. Uneven, irregular, and phlegmatic, the slow-moving pace and dense tempo is supposed to represent a pig's listless wallow through the mire. Various Hammond organ riffs flow and then recede, and the muddy guitar and bass lines aid in the song's imagery as they latch on to Nick Mason's rather routine drum work. But the music throughout "Pigs" and the rest of Animals is justifiably secondary in this case, and those who favored Pink Floyd's musical adeptness and the uniformity of the band as a whole were understandably disappointed with the final result of Animals when it reached the shelves. But for those who longed to hear Waters bear his feelings, exclaim his conservative hatred, and expose himself as an even angrier young man were, of course, in their glory. - Mike DeGagne


Sheep
Composed By Roger Waters
Performed By Pink Floyd
Length 10:20
Appears On Animals [1977]


AMG REVIEW: "Sheep" ties up the concept of 1977's Animals quite nicely. Within the story line of the song, the sheep (representing the oppressed and the manipulated masses in society) rise up and revolt against the powerful dogs who attempt to take advantage of them and exploit them. Almost led to slaughter, the sheep form a silent union to overtake the corruptive dogs, realizing that they have been ill-treated, subservient, and tyrannized for too long. Beginning with the peaceful sounds of sheep grazing and birds singing, the song then erupts with Waters' explosive voice, a feat Gilmour admitted he could never recapture if he sung it himself. The song was originally called "Raving and Drooling" when performed in its early stages throughout their Dark Side tour, but was changed to keep the song titles as animal names. Within the middle of the song, an altered form of the 23rd Psalm (The Lord is my shepherd...) is heard, although it's hard to make out since it is spoken through a Vocoder, but it goes on to illustrate how the sheep have rebelled against the evil dogs. The instrumental aspects of the song involve Rick Wright playing some impressive Hammond organ work, capturing the serenity of the grazing sheep and filling in behind Gilmour's guitar throughout the song. Gilmour's guitar playing is quite impressive in itself, conjuring up the frantic scene of the mighty sheep's backlash with some feverish string bending. "Sheep"'s use of the organ reflects Floyd's early sound of the late '60s but only slightly, as it quickly switches into a straight-ahead rock song which carries the underlying message of Animals clearly throughout its lyrics. - Mike DeGagne








Pink Floyd
Animals


Produced by Pink Floyd
Recorded March--December 1976 at Britannia Row Studios in Islington, Longdon, England
Released January 23, 1977
Sleeve Design by Roger Waters and Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell)
Graphics by Nick Mason
Chart placing: #2 in the UK; #3 in the US


1977 marked a time for change in the music industry--disco and punk were becoming popular, and established rock bands like Pink Floyd were on the decline. The newer "musicians" like Johnny Rotten targeted progressive rock as being "lame" and "uncool", and Mr. Rotten made this point known by taking Pink Floyd T-Shirts and writing "I hate" over the logo. Even though Pink Floyd's followers didn't stray from the band, the music media had a very negative view of the Floyd. The band, unfortunately, had no strength to do anything about their image because of the massive touring over the past few years, and took most of 1976 in the studios again to record a new album. The band spent 500,000 pounds on the latest in studio equpiment and were eager to put it to use. This was the last recording session in which Waters, Gilmour, Mason, and Wright were all on good terms with each other. Waters was very much in control, but a weary Gilmour was passive about things and let Waters have his way.

Nearing the height of his dominance in the group, Waters had become the only band member who could pen meaningful lyrics, and the band had relied on him soley for lyrics and the majority of the songs. "Animals" found the band relying on him more than ever, with Waters writing all the lyrics and nearly all the music. This marks a time when he moved from the ambiguity of the lyrics of "Dark Side of the Moon", and to an extent, "Wish You Were Here", to much more confrontational lyrics. "Pigs (3 Different Ones)" is a direct attack on specific people, and the other songs reflect the very dark tone of the album, which is part of the theme--based on George Orwell's "Animal Farm". Waters claims he was "trying to push the band into more specific areas of subject matter, trying to be more direct. Visually, I was trying to get away from the blobs...there isn't much left for you to interpret."

Oddly enough, the Floyd's best concept album began with no concept, just three songs accumulated from the past few years. Halfway through the studio session, Waters realized he could use George Orwell's concept of people as being animals, and paralleled them in our social lives. In the eyes of Waters, you are either a dog, pig or a sheep. Dogs are the crafty cutthroats who travel in groups, in a pecking order, each one trying to screw the other over to achieve success. Pigs are the overbearing dictators who have a great fear for what they don't understand, but claim to know what is best for everyone. They impose this on the sheep, who are the meek and obediant subserviants to the world. They realize what has become of them and revolt, but are eventually put back in their place and taken advantage of again. It's human nature in a graphic display of our true inner selves, represented in animal form. Waters' lyrics dominate the album, although the music is brilliant as well. The album cover is one of the best ever, with Gilbert Scott's huge Battersea Power Station as the symbol for mankind's constant laboring, surrounded by industrial train tracks, trash and coal. It has a very ominous and dark Orwellian feel, and evokes a sense of power.

Waters came up with putting a pig over the station, symbolizing greediness, but didn't want it to be artificially created. A giant pig was designed to be inflated and placed over the station, and was so big that the first attempt to send it up had to be halted because it was dark before it was blown up. There were forty photographers and a man with a rifle (should the pig fly away), but he was removed because of cost. The following day, the pig was launched, secured with ropes, but a huge wind blew the pig off the ropes and it flew off into the air. The pig flew off south of London, interloping in the flight paths of airplanes, and Heathrow Airport was called about a flying pig--one pilot who reported it to the control tower was even given a brethalyzer test! Radar contact diminished after 18,000 feet, and it finally crashed to the ground and was recovered and sent back for more photos. Even after all the effort to re-shoot the pig, they ended up superimposing a picture of the original pig shoot onto the picture of the powerstation. Still, it remains one of the greatest album covers of all time.



Pigs On The Wing (part one)

Recorded: November 1976 at Britannia Row Studios
Roger Waters: acoustic guitar and double tracked vocals

The opening and closing tracks are almost identical, and are actually love songs, which is very uncharacteristic of Waters. He wrote the songs for his new wife, Carolyne Christie, who is the niece of the Marquis of Zetland and a one time secretary to Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin. At first listen, it is an obtrusive, meaningless piece in the way of the meat of the album. Upon closer inspection, it is the only thing that keeps the album from being a 45 minute, as Waters puts it, "scream of rage". Apparantly, Carolyne was exactly what Waters needed, someone to match wits with his argumentative and pessemistic mind. "Roger was very good with words, and you had to be good at semantics to beat him in an argument." says Peter Jenner. "Poor Syd didn't have that skill, and neither did any of the others for that matter. I think he was looking for someone to stand up to him all along." The song was one of the last to be recorded, and was written by Waters in a demo session a few months earlier. The song's meaning is that Waters had finally found someone who can help him escape the madness of life. This especially rang true for Waters following the huge success of "Wish You Were Here" and "Dark Side Of The Moon", and his new wife made him much happier and stopped him from transforming into a "pig". Even the band said he was much easier to work with.The third line comes from the original version of "Sheep", called "Raving and Drooling", and stems from the phrase "and pigs might fly", meaning achieving the impossible. The Floyd certainly did just that with this incredible album.


Dogs

Recorded: March-December 1976 at Britannia Row Studios
Roger Waters: bass, vocals, vocoder, tape effects
Dave Gilmour: guitar, vocals, double tracked vocals
Rick Wright: Hammond organ, Fender-Rhodes and Yamaha pianos, ARP String Machine synthesizer, backing vocals
Nick Mason: drums, percussion, tape effects


Interview with David Gilmour about "Dogs"

Guitar World: On the next Pink Floyd album, Animals, "Dogs" is the only song not written soley by Roger. What was your part in co-writing "Dogs" with him?

Gilmour: I basically wrote all the chords--the main music part of it. And we wrote some other bits together at the end.

GW:What did you play on that?

Gilmour: A custom Telecaster. I was coming through some Hiwatt amps and a couple of Yamaha rotating speaker cabinets--Leslie style cabinets that they used to make. I used to use two of those on stage along with the regular amps. That slight Leslie effect made a big difference in the sound.

This is the song. It began years before, when the band would play it during the summer of 1974, when it was known as "You Gotta Be Crazy". The fact that they "road tested" a lot of their material on audiences to find out what worked and what didn't is one of the things that made the Floyd so great in the 70's. The song was so good that little changed over the 3 years, making it the strongest track on the album. "Dogs" are overachieving back-stabbers who climb the success ladder any way they can, only to die at an old age of cancer, or to be dragged down by the very weight they used to need to throw around. This track features some of Waters' most brilliant lyrics, such as "you just keep on pretending that everyone's expendable and no one has a real friend"--showing that the dogs think everyone is as shifty and cutthroat as they are, but no one admits it. This is also prominent in the line "you believe at heart everyone's a killer"--the dogs are paranoid and always looking over their shoulders for another dog to attack them. The best line, however, is "just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer". This is sung to the dog, in an almost frustrating last resort to try and tell the dog off. He's saying that no matter how successful and powerful the dog may become, he will end up like all the rest. "Another" in the line says that there are many others like him, and "dying of cancer" is one of those lines that makes you think, whether you're a dog or not, about your own mortality. The most striking part is that he wishes the dog would die. "The stone" is the symbol for negativity and pessemism, and probably Waters used this as a way of dealing with his own personality traits, realizing how negative and pessemistic he had become. The stone prevents you from enjoying life and leaves you stuck to wallow in your own bitterness, which Waters seemed to thrive on in other works such as "The Wall" and "The Final Cut". The song itself began with Gilmour's opening guitar chords, and it was given to Waters during the "Wish You Were Here" sessions for approval, but tossed aside because it didn't fit in with the album. Ultimately it became some of Gilmour's best guitar solo work, and Gilmour himself finds it one of his best pieces. Unfortunately, the best version never reached the public's ears because of an inadvertant error by Waters. Not accustomed to the new studio equipment, he accidentally erased Gilmour's best take of the solo, and the second version, although incredible, was not as good as the original. Gilmour attempted to mimic the growling and barking of a dog, and it is evident in the song. The actual dog noises were created by a tape of dog barks put through a Vocoder, which creates the sound into synthesizer chords, and then ran through a Leslie (rotating) speaker.


Pigs (Three Different Ones)


Recorded: April-May 1976 at Britannia Row Studios
Roger Waters: bass, double tracked vocal
David Gilmour: guitar
Rick Wright: Hammond organ, ARP synthesizer
Nick Mason: drums

"Pigs" are those who think they know what is right for everyone, regardless of what they think. These people are simply charades, and their overbearing nature and tendancy to act like they are better than everyone else is really a product of their own fears in life. The song has three verses and one pig in each verse. The first pig is a corporate pig, who does everything he can to get success, almost like a dog. The second pig is a bitter woman Waters says represents Margaret Thatcher, whose conservative political views clash harshly with Waters' strong socialist politics. The third pig is Mary Whitehouse, leader of the National Viewers and Listeners Association at the time, and strong campaigner for censorship in Britain, which Waters was very much opposed to. Waters tinkered with the lyrics for six months, and feared using her name because of retaliation, but after seeing her in the papers week after week decided to put it in. She made nasty comments about Pink Floyd in the 60's, claiming they glorified drugs, sex and hedonism. "Why does she make such a fuss about everything if she isn't motivated by fear?" asked Waters. "She's frightened that we're all being perverted." The middle part of the song is Gilmour's talk box imitating a squealing pig, which uses voice to shape the notes, which makes the guitar talk. This song contains some of Waters' most bitter and ingenius lyrics, most notably "you radiate cold shafts of broken glass", which is a gem in the Floyd lyric archives. There is a rich imagery of words here, "pig stain on your fat chin", "tight lips and cold feet", all evoke images of greedy, power-hungry...well, pigs.



Sheep
Recorded: April, May and July 1976
Roger Waters: bass, vocals
David Gilmour: guitar
Rick Wright: Fender-Rhodes piano, Hammond organ
Nick Mason: drums

Waters wrote "Sheep" specifically for the road, and it was played under its original title of "Raving and Drooling" at the same time that "Dogs" appeared in the Floyd's set list. Written about a man who was clearly insane, Waters thought the band should include some new material in the set list, and even changed the title (temporarily) to "I Fell On His Neck With A Scream", a very old Floydian style of song title. Waters re-wrote the lyrics for the album, creating a vision of ignorant, peaceful beings being led to the slaughterhouse, suddenly realizing what is wrong, then rebelling against their oppressors. Disturbingly, there is a parody of the 23rd psalm, performed by Nick Mason live, but on the album it is an unknown Floyd roadie blaspheming through a vocoder. The verse does contain a very intersting use of words "with bright knives"--very discriptive indeed. The song's literal meaning is that of what could happen if the conditions in England did not get better, that the people might revolt against the "too conservative" government. Waters' own socialist beliefs are very prominent here, and was seen as a prophetic view of Britain in the 80's. Roger puts it this way: "Sheep was my sense of what was to come down in England, and it did last summer with the riots in England, in Brixton and Toxeth, and it will happen again. It will always happen. There are too many of us in the world and we treat each other badly. We get obsessed with things, and there aren't enough of things, products, to go round. If we're persuaded it's important to have them, that we're nothing without them, and there aren't enough of them to go round, the people without them are going to get angry. Content and discontent follow very closely the rise and fall on the graph of world recession and expansion." Although Gilmour was very pleased with his solo at the end (it is one of the finest Floyd riffs ever), he didn't include it on the '87 or '94 tours. He claimed he couldn't achieve the bitter vocals well enough, though he has hinted at it popping up on the next tour.



Pigs On The Wing (part two)
Recorded: December 1976 at Britania Row Studios
Roger Waters: Ovation acoustic guitar, double tracked vocals

This coda, to what may be the most downbeat album Pink Floyd ever recorded, is an upbeat way to bring the album down gently and not end on a sour note. It also functions to preserve the continuity of the album, which in many ways is a negative way of saying the cycle is never-ending. The positive overtone, however, is that if you find someone you can share your life with, you can avoid the harmful effects of the Dogs, Pigs and Sheep. Waters says the first verse means "where would I be without you?" and the second verse says "in the face of all this other shit--you care, and that makes it possible to survive."