Review Summary: Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine? Is this not what you expected to see?
Believe it or not, Roger Waters and Doug Walker have a lot more in common than you'd think. No, really. Sure, one is a legendary musician, was part of the legendary band Pink Floyd, and helped leave his mark on pop culture with a number of iconic albums to his name, and the other is an angry internet guy who makes videos of himself shouting at the camera about movies, but there's a word in that previous sentence that unites the two: anger. Both seem to be defined by that very emotion; it's the word that sums up how Roger Waters decides to sing about certain subjects.
Wish You Were Here expresses his anger at corporations and how they treat workers- musicians, ordinary people, you name it,
Animals is a glorified rant about CEOs, religion and politicians, and his legendary rock opera
The Wall is where he lashes out at the government, the military, fans, groupies, and pretty much everything under the sun as he builds a physical wall around himself... only to realize building walls only worsens his problems, and destroy said wall. And just one look at any Nostalgia Critic video, and it's clear that he feels very strongly about whatever it is he decides to rant about. His review of the legendary Yuletide animated dumpster fire
The Christmas Tree is a perfect example, where he rants about how whoever made the film completely missed the point of Christmas. There's plenty more examples I could use, but this one is a lot more profound than it has any right to be.
So it goes without saying that it's completely baffling that a review of
The Wall from him could be so off-the-mark. Keep in mind too, if this was just that, a review, I wouldn't be writing this. Walker could have spared himself the scourge of the internet by just making an unfunny video of him just shouting at the camera about how much he hates
The Wall, and left it at that. But nope, he just HAD to go above and beyond to prove to the world just how terrible he is at critiquing things that aren't movies. Admittedly, the idea of doing a review as a sort of musical isn't a bad one. Hell, the idea of making a parody of the album/movie to review it is pretty decent too. With the aid of Rob Scallon, a multi-instrumentalist, he does just that. So what could go wrong? The answer? Everything. And if it wasn't bad enough that this has ended up being his worst review since his review of
Hocus Pocus, he decided to release the completely unlistenable "parody music" for people to buy... to listen to,
as an album. Yes, for 7 buckaroos, you can cringe to such masterpieces as "Waiting For the Point", or "Comfortably Dumb", without the aid of its cringe-worthy visual counterpart.
Now let's pretend for a second that there wasn't a video to accompany this album. That Walker and Scallon just decided one day to parody The Wall. That this was made as a "just for fun". That it's just a parody album in the same vein as Cal Cuchesta's
The New Cal-assic, or Weird Al's classic
Off the Deep End. Would this still be an absolute failure? Yes. Absolutely it would. The entire point of parody is to do something out of love and acknowledge its merits while still brutally riffing on it. Why did Kurt Cobain love "Smells Like Nirvana?" Because it made fun of things like not understanding the lyrics to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Nirvana's Seattle upbringings while still tastefully acknowledging things like its iconic melodies. Doing things like taking "Comfortably Numb" and changing it to "Comfortably Dumb" isn't parody. Hell, it's something I did when I was in 3rd grade, sing about how stupid something was to the tune of the original. That's what Walker does for
The Entire Album. "In the Floyd" starts the album off by having Walker sing to Corey Taylor (we'll get to his presence on this project in a bit) about how
The Wall isn't good at all, with the sole criticism he makes being calling
The Wall "weird shit". And he does this for a whole 42 minutes. His criticism of "Another Brick in the Wall" being that it's little other than a "school sucks" song, when anyone who has done their research on the album would know that it's anything but, that it's a protest song against the violent politics of British education systems in the 50s and 60s that traumatized a whole generation of British children. His criticism of "Goodbye, Blue Sky" is calling it an "Oscar-bait song", somehow completely missing that
The Wall was an album before being a movie.
Which brings me to how this project stands as a piece of criticsm. Walker and co. have exactly 3 categories of criticism: "I'm a rockstar with millions, how could I be depressed" (Chester Bennington would like a word with you), "Roger needs to stop whining and bitching" (they're probably right about that, but not for the reasons they seem to think they are), and "This song sucks/nobody cares about this/nobody remembers this". Just look at the title for the obligatory parody of "Is There Anybody Out There", "Is There Anybody Who Cares". Good question, I wonder if
The Wall was a big selling album and is routinely seen as one of the best/most iconic albums of all time! Likewise, "Bring the Boys Back Home" is an excuse to rant about how long the movie/album is, yet elsewhere in the review, he criticizes the story for having "no character development", proving that a story like
The Wall is way beyond his reach. And if I hadn't taken the time to listen to the album independently from the review, I wouldn't have known that "The Forgotten Song" was a parody of "Hey You". Guess what Doug has to say about it? You're right: "nobody remembers this song". By now, you're probably seeing a pattern: I'm just scratching the surface, because that's all there is to this whole project. Sheer surface. Nothing of substance, nothing of absolutely anything. Need proof? Watch the visual counterpart. Somehow they got Corey Taylor to be a part of this mess, and all he does for the review is sit around and look stoned, or like he'd rather be elsewhere. Somehow they can afford to get Taylor to be in this review, but they can't pay the pretty penny needed for decent special effects. Somehow they can afford to hire Corey Taylor, but give him zero musical contributions outside of a cover of the
SpongeBob SquarePants theme song. That's right. After the obligatory "The Trial" type song, instead of an "Outside the Wall" type song, Channel Awesome team and Corey Taylor and co. engage in a cover of the theme to SpongeBob. That's right. The Grammy-winning singer for bands like Slipknot and Stone Sour is given nothing but a cover of FUCKING SpongeBob. The absolute fuck does SpongeBob have to do with
The Wall? Your guess is as good as mine.
It's worth noting that at one point in the review, Walker, out of character, talks to the camera and informs us that this whole project was a "love letter to
The Wall, and Pink Floyd's music". Sure. It's as much a love letter as this review is to his channel. It's not that YouTube channels shouldn't branch out; YourMovieSucksDOTorg's long awaited "An Unkindness" musical project shows just how multi-talented he is; RalphTheMovieMaker's film
Lover is way better than an armchair critic product has any right to be, and Poppy has shown us how innovative she can be when she mixes her YouTube channel's weirdness with synth pop and Heavy Metal. Hell, Walker's video on Fair Use is incredible and makes very compelling and sympathetic points, and I'm sure that Walker could do a good job with a comedy album if he tried, and put the effort required into understanding what makes comedy music work. So it's completely baffling that a parody from him could be so of the mark, when considering videos like his review of
Jem and the Holograms. But here we are;
Nostalgia Critic's The Wall is the lowest rated album of 2019 on RateYourMusic, there's already reviews of his review on YouTube, and if his complicit dealing with sexual abuse allegations at Channel Awesome didn't kill his relevance already, then this album certainly will. So don't go beating your heart against some mad bugger's wall, Doug, because we aren't listening.
