Pink Floyd

The Wall

"The Wall", good as "Dark Side of The Moon"

Review Score:

(10/10)
Ah, December 1979. Inflation is high, recession is coming, the hopes of Iranian liberty are being slowly but quite surely throttled by a nasty theocracy, Suharto and Botha can look to another decade of blood-drenched power, The Soviets are invading Afghanistan, the Americans are thereby giving yet another bloodthirsty Pakistani junta an undeserved lease on life, the Italian Christian Democratic Party has wiggled out of a well deserved nemesis, Thatcher has taken power, Reagan is rising, Archbishop Romero has only a few months to live, American cinema is on the brink of financial disaster, followed by artistic collapse, and most pop music sucks. (I mean really, "I Love the Nightlife"?) So it's time to get back to the basics, and here is "The Wall" to do it.

The obvious objection to "The Wall" is what has Roger Waters got to complain about. Pink Floyd has already produced (at least) three well-received albums that decade, one of them one of the most insanely successful in history. That Eastern Europeans should confuse the title of this with the Berlin wall certainly shows a lack of proportion, does it not? Why should we care about the self-pity and solipsism of a wealthy rock-star? Well, first, because it is not all his fault. Waters/Pink is an orphan. Dying at Anzio is no doubt better more productive than dying on the Somme, but it doesn't make being orphaned any happier. British education can be horribly life-denying and petty. There is good reason for Waters to be terrified at the prospect of nuclear war in "Goodbye Blue Skies." After all, the cold war was an enormous gamble, and as Iraq shows, not all "realist" or neoconservative gambles work. Secondly, it's not as if perfect maturity and mental health was or is the default setting of our modern world. If people's marriages fall apart, if their families are claustrophobic, if they are full of impotent and not so impotent rage and hatred, it's not as if we could simply pride ourselves on our superior morality and ignore them. Lovelessness and solipism are not simply Waters' fault.

Third, the music's great. Waters' and Gilmour's voices are perfect for the roles they play, the one self-pitying, guilty, spiteful, and angry, the other blandly horrible in an especially British way. There is a certain evil reality in such lyrics as "Cold as a razor blade, tight as a tournequet/dry as a funeral drum" as they describe despair better than anything else. There are the opening bars, with a certain false lightness, of "Nobody Home." There is a real insight in the desperation, and authentic misogyny, of "Don't Leave Me Now." "Bring the Boys Back Home" is brief, but heartbreaking. There is the heartbreaking "Comfortably Numb," as beautiful childhood experience is purged from the memory, and there is the threat of fascism in "Run Like Hell." There are the ominious (perfect!) undertones of "Another Brick in the Wall, Part One". But there are few seconds as powerful as the last bars of "The Happiest Days of Our Lives," where the crescendo of imperial glory crashes into the nightmare of Britian in 1979. There should have been another way, but since there wasn't "The Wall" is the best way to end the seventies.

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