"The Wall", by Pink Floyd - Negative Review

“The Rock Star Experience” is a much-told cautionary tale that usually ends with the same message: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. And ironically, being such a basic story of man’s struggle against himself, it lends itself endlessly to the very medium that it essentially condemns. You can draw a parallel between being a rock star and being a religious/spiritual guru, like The Who’s Tommy. You can show how even through fame, the experience of life is still nothing more than a day-to-day thought process no different from anyone else’s, like the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. Or, you can just whine about the California lifestyle and suck at everything, like the Eagles’ Hotel California. And then, there’s Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

If you believe the hype, The Wall is the seminal rock opera that paints one of the most vivid and poetic pictures of the isolation and insanity that close in when a rock star finally realizes that nothing he’s accomplished will really fill the void inside him. The artist is never satisfied, because the only fans he has are the people who would already have always agreed with his message, and he knows he may never actually change the world. The Stones summed it up in one song, and Roger Waters tries to sum it up in an epic double-disc autobiography (and make no mistake, the struggle of The Wall’s protagonist is entirely Rogers’ own). In his later solo works, Rogers tries to express these feelings through songs with much more obvious political charges. In The Wall, he tries to express it through the eyes of a drugged and delirious singer who thinks he’s a Nazi.

That’s a pretty bold statement to make. “All of you fans are so damn stupid that I could be up here starting a genocide and you’d just keep cheering.” Unfortunately, this is as deep into it as he really goes. This is the great weakness of the entire album: it observes all the disturbing characteristics of insanity without ever really coming to a further understanding. “In The Flesh” has the lead character spouting things like “That one looks Jewish, that one’s a coon! Who let all this riffraff into the room?”. Okay. We get it. He’s yelling like a psycho. So... what’s the point?

Unfortunately, the point is that there is no point. The album ends with a Möbius Strip, with the end of the final song segueing into the opening notes of the first. The final song offers no closure, except something like “don’t forget that it’s not easy for the people who care about you to put up with you when you’re down”. The easy answer is that there is no answer, and of course it’s ultimately wise to say “The only thing I know is that I know nothing”. But still, it seems like kind of a cop out. If the only thing that Waters can say after all this is, “Well, that’s life”, then why do we care about it? Why do we want to listen to this guy whine about being famous? And he is pretty whiny, if songs like “Don’t Leave Me Now”, “Another Brick in the Wall Part 3”, “Vera” and “Stop” are any indication. He’s whiny enough to be the Luke Skywalker of rock and roll. And it’s certainly not his fault that songs like “Comfortably Numb” and “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2” have become overplayed, but it is his fault that these are two of the only songs on the album that anyone who isn’t famous can identify with (about drug addiction and totalitarian school systems, respectively). Even the albums most powerful songs about ideas that we can all understand even if we can’t relate to them exactly (Mother, Goodbye Blue Sky, Hey You) are not enough to save this massive orgy of depression that, ironically, shuts itself off from the listener by doing a good job at the exact thing it was created to do (express alienation). Not all of us lost a dad in a war or have issues with beating up our girlfriends, Roger.