Review Series: The Wall | by Pink Floyd (1979)

This ubiquitous, single-churning rock opera subverts clichés, vividly juxtaposing fame and loss in a delusional haze.

Roger Waters’ Pink Floyd was not the most likeable band in the world…because of, well, Roger Waters. The many detractors from the sneering, irritable creative leader should especially hate The Wall. At surface, it’s like a bombastic inflation of himself. Concept albums are risky affairs as is. Make it a double concept album and “disaster” — through hubris or plot deterioration — is as likely as “classic.” (Luckily, Floyd’s plodding, ethereal abstraction was a sonic choice rather than the effect of substances. So, there was always a chance this might stick.) The story follows an insular rock star, Waters’ semi-autobiographical Pink, to the precipice of self-destruction. The second disc’s conclusion loops to the first’s beginning. In this sense — not unlike Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick — the author traces the roots of the now-destroyed Wall from wartime childhood (“Goodbye Blue Sky”), through defiant schoolboy years (“Another Brick in the Wall”), sheltered young adulthood (“Mother”), and tenuous sanity as a rock star (“Young Lust”; “One of My Turns”).

Embedded in all of this is the linking thread of Waters’ psyche — an anger at war and its agents, fixated on the fate of his father whom he had been too young to remember (“In the Flesh”). Some of the record’s best rock channels this personal tumult and reveals its brooding conscience (“Hey You”; “Comfortably Numb”). Transferred to the persona of Pink, with support from the recurring musical motifs of the singles, the story somehow holds together. This includes the thematic isolation and oppressive memory of the Wall itself: a character as important as the star. The bulwark meets its end when the protagonist awakens from a lengthy fascist hallucination (“In the Flesh?”; “Run Like Hell”; “The Trial”) before the experience elegantly reincarnates itself.

As record, The Wall, in the end, is either a big chunk of stone you mine for hits and hooks; or a semi-relatable, well-thought, mostly lucid story. A complete listen won’t come without some finger-drumming and bemusement. This is tolerable because Floyd is playing as a true unit (for the last time), the core tracks are deftly reprised and repurposed to mask the filler, and the whole is quite moving. Waters pulled it off. Not likeably; the humanization of his tragic obsession would await the next, simultaneously more effective and concise statement, which was The Final Cut.

Four Stars (of Five).

Pink Floyd was as overambitious as any band trying to make a double concept album threaded with a single story. It could have ended badly, in an inscrutable, hallucinogenic mess with frayed ends of a plot. Instead, we got admirable imperfection — a sincerely good listening experience which leaves us disconcerted and disoriented, just as intended.