10 Albums That Changed Rock Music Forever

After the British blues boom started to fall apart at the start of the '70s, bands were looking to do more than just your average 12 bar jams. Jimmy Page had already left the Yardbirds to form something new with Robert Plant, and Cream were on their last legs with Eric Clapton getting into his solo career in the next few years. Pink Floyd may have grown up in those same clubs in the '60s, but the next phase of their career saw everything spreading out much more than anyone could have thought.

While Meddle was the first album that signaled a change of the guard in Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon could be credited with inventing the sounds of progressive rock, taking the basic concepts of everyday life and making different meditations on them that go on for long extended musical sections. This isn't just playing for the sake of playing either, leaving just the fundamentals of rock music in there and letting the ideas of mortality and time really sink in, from David Gilmour's solo on Money crying out in pain to the maniacal laugh from the lunatic on the song Brain Damage.

Although not every one of these songs is necessarily single material, the overarching concept behind Dark Side is something that really needs to be taken in as a full experience, giving you a more artistic statement about how people live their lives from day to day. No matter if you're a rock star or just another man on the street, life never really gets any easier, and sometimes it takes an album to hold up a mirror to us and ask us what we really want out of our life.