One thing about Netflix I find both frustrating and kind of neat is that movies show up in my mailbox that I don’t even remember putting in my queue, probably because I did so as long as a year ago—such is the glacial pace at which I’ve been working my way through it. So I often receive surprises: movies I forgot I wanted to watch but am now eager to, or movies I can’t even remember why I wanted to see in the first place.

I got a pleasant surprise of the former variety when I opened a little red envelope to find a documentary about Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon—an album I hadn’t listened to, much less thought about, for at least a few years.

Which is a shame, because: Dude. It’s fucking Dark Side of the Moon. But very few progressive rock legacies have weathered very well, least of all the Floyd—despoiled as it was by Roger Waters’ and David Gilmour’s very public, twenty-year feud; the inevitable slew of uneven solo albums on everyone’s part; and of course David Gilmour’s grandiose perseveration with the Floyd name throughout the eighties and nineties. Also, chops-wise, Pink Floyd wasn’t as superficially impressive: they didn’t have the blistering pyrotechnics of a King Crimson or Led Zeppelin, preferring sustained blues notes on the guitar, whole notes on the organ, and deceptively simple drum parts.

All of which is a shame, because again: Dude. It’s fucking Dark Side of the Moon. Just because an album stays on the Billboard Top 200 for fourteen straight years and garners hyperbolic amounts of critical acclaim and creates the blueprint for the next thirty years of concept-driven, blues-inflected progressive rock and is embraced by stoners and frat boys alike, doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve all those accolades.

I guess it’s not very hip to like Pink Floyd anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. Like other ubiquitous, larger-than-life bands, groups so huge it doesn’t even seem like they should be allowed to continue creating music—Led Zeppelin, U2, the Beatles—Pink Floyd is best enjoyed in retrospect, as a museum piece. They are a platinum monster, as David Fricke says in the documentary, but their cultural capital has long since declined. But even if Pink Floyd is no longer cool—the overplayed classic-rock staple your divorced uncle still listens to in his basement—that shouldn’t make it any less vital, relevant, or sexy. I guarantee that without Dark Side there’d be no Kid A, no Sound of Silver, no I Can Hear the Heart.

Dark Side of the Moon was also the first compact disc I ever owned. In December 1991, after extended deliberations and much filibustering, my household’s executive branch finally allocated funds to purchase a high-fidelity component stereo system, replete with a 5-disc Sony CD player and a pair of high-end tower speakers so fine that the executive branch didn’t even know the caliber of audio equipment she was purchasing when the junior members of her cabinet dragged her into the speaker room at Best Buy. But seventeen years later that disc changer and those Advent speakers still function perfectly.

I bought Dark Side at the Music Shop in Grinnell a few days before Christmas, and several days before we drove to Des Moines to buy the stereo itself. So I had the CD before I had a means of playing it. I took it to Mark’s house, whose governing body had long ago authorized purchase of a high-end component stereo system, and we listened to Dark Side along with the first CD Mark ever owned, which was Van Halen’s 1984. I also took the CD to the home of one of my father’s colleagues, for whom I was cat-sitting, and listened to it on the sort of high-end component stereo system unmarried Russian professors own.

So for me, Dark Side represents not just a crucial chapter in my indoctrination into the possibilities of progressive rock, but also the beginning of my adolescent wonder with music technology and the sonic spectrum. I sat there with that compact disc on my finger and stared at the prismatic colors playing across its shiny, pristine surface, transfixed by the novelty of a technology already entering its obsolescence.

For me, Dark Side also represents not so much the epitome of tired classic-rock radio still pumped out of Des Moines over the mid-90s range of the dial, or stoned frat boys, or washed-up guitar store employees—but rather, the newness of adolescence; the safety and reliability, however fragile, of friends and family around Christmastime; the perpetual promise, often illusory but in Dark Side’s case real and transcendent, of technological and aesthetic innovation beyond that to which we long ago became accustomed.