One Day Apart 50 Years Ago

Two separate game changers, if such a thing is reasonable to believe exists, were released a day apart exactly 50 years ago this year. On February 28th, 1973, the following book was officially published:

Hailed by some as a masterpiece and scorned by others as unreadable nonsense, Gravity's Rainbow is a treatise on America's obsession with death as well as a mimic of the shotgun-to-the-senses that pop-culture bot oddly was and is. The timeline the story follows is nearly the end of the second world war through to the end, and naming the time period is easier than trying to explain the plot. 

Because...well, you be the judge: one of the main characters is an American serviceman named Tyrone Slothrop who, as an infant, was programmed Pavlov-style to get erections at the sound of explosions and now, as the war starts to turn in the Allies favor, seems to have mapped out where rockets will fall on London by the women he's been bedding, all the while he searches for a specific German rocket with the serial number 00000, which turns out to be equipped to take a sex-slave wearing a living plastic onesie...

And there's so much more...

And the next day, on March 1st, 1973, the following album was officially released:

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is one of those albums that everyone's heard songs from, and while it's not the first 'concept album', it is credited with being one of the severely important ones. It's my own memories that my dad didn't like the synthesizer work very much, which is why I didn't grow up with this album like I did with the Jimi Hendrix's and Led Zeppelin's of the world. But today, I certainly recognize the power and beauty of the work.

Sometimes the coincidences of historical touchstones emerging are, eh, powerful...?