Has it aged well? I donāt know really, to me it seems of itās time, but thatās not necessarily a bad thing.
When people talk about it being overrated, Iām inclined to agree, though Iām wary of using the term. I mean, if something is rated highly by a small number of critics thatās one thing, but if weāre talking about a large group of people who consider themselves to be music fans, can the same be said? On Rate Your Music, it currently has a score of 4.24, which is pretty high, averaged from over 36,000 ratings. But maybe an explanation for its reputation lies in the timing of its release. From what I understand (because I wasnāt around then) Pink Floyd had the good fortune to release this record at precisely the time that Hifi systems were being manufactured at a price point that captured the mass market. In retrospect, itās not really surprising that Dark Side took off the way it did, along with Mike Oldfieldās Tubular Bells, as the whistles-and-bells production on both albums was great for demonstrating what Hifi systems could do. In fact, most of the retailers probably used copies of these records as a sales tool. I remember when I was shopping around for my first āseparatesā Hifi in the early 90s, shops I went into almost always had one of the two, usually both, albeit on CD rather than vinyl. I reckon that itās reputation is built on the way it sounded, or rather the way that people experienced it, compared to anything that had come before.
As for itās ongoing reputation / ability to capture new, younger audiences through the decades, all I can say is that when something is described as a classic often enough it becomes a self-sustaining legacy.
