Review Summary: The death of rock in a single album.
Pink Floyd's The Wall is the most miserable album ever produced. This sad collection of music is at its heart Roger Waters' attack on the world; it is an act of musical violence that is conducted spitefully and without love of music. It is a record of personal resentment that has gone beyond the individual, and spawned an entire mythos of the fall of rock music and its musicians, which has become inseparable from the music itself.
The Wall was created under the backdrop of misery that mirrored the musical output: bitterness in the band (which resulted in the firing of Richard Wright), a strained marriage, loss of friendship, financial anxiety, legal trouble, and grueling recording sessions. From the very start, the album was doomed to be an exceedingly dreary affair: the catalyst of the album was a famous incident in which an enraged Roger Waters spat on a fan during a concert in Montreal. He was disturbed by his action and wished that he could separate himself from the audience with a wall; thus, the concept was born. This incident presents the entire project in a microcosm: Roger Waters stands for the rockstar, his spit is the album, and the audience is the world (in particular, listeners of The Wall, but in general, the entire world without distinction). A concrete act of violence is transformed into an abstract violence of music. Being spat on is degrading, but it doesn't leave a lasting impact besides the painful memory; in this way, listening to The Wall is very much like being spat upon.
The concept of the album that was a result of Roger Waters' act is central to the music, so much so that the songs seem to only exist to advance the narrative. The story follows the pathetic life of the rockstar "Pink" as he comes to shut out the world by constructing his personal wall. This story hardly amounts to more than a litany of traumas: the psychosexual, violent, hedonistic, and adolescent.
In the golden age of rock, the vices of the rocker created a dark energy that the musician would wield like a shaman; he would call forth negative forces to hypnotise the masses. But now, on The Wall, these same forces turn the rocker inward and transform him into a withering heap, devoid of power and interest. The result is a portrayal of an unsympathetic character who is incapable of catharsis, tragedy, or development. This is the story of The Wall, which is really the story of the fall of rock music.Â*
The songs that illustrate this portrait have no reason to exist outside supporting the plot. More properly speaking, this album is a collection of half-songs that sound like unfinished, partial ideas. The overall sound is anemic and lifeless. What is most offensive about them is their lazy and often embarrassingly bad melodies, which are sung in an annoying, grating tone by Waters: Goodbye Blue Sky, Is the Anybody out There?, and Nobody Home are three egregious offenders, and much of the album takes the same note. The monotonous Mother can be contrasted with the beautiful Wish You Were Here which serves a similar function as an emotional acoustic track. In this comparison, we can see how far the songwriting has fallen from only a few years prior. These poor songs are often interrupted on the album by sound collages and skits that describe the action of the plot, but, like the songs, these hardly have any merit of their own. These little interludes become increasingly infuriating as the album goes on.
The chief characteristic of the songs here is a complete lack of the love of music; every chord is played with a palpable hatred. The hard rock opening In the Flesh? is but a false start that quickly descends into the album's defining listlessness. When the group does ramp things up, it is done entirely without taste, like on the desperately melodramatic Don't Leave me Now and on the ridiculous musical theatre of The Trial. The only time the band plays with a discernible pulse is when they decide to imitate ZZ Top on the track Young Lust, which turns out to be the best song on the album. Other signs of life are channeled by David Gilmour who plays a pair of lovely solos on Comfortably Numb, and saves the childish melody of Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 with a bold concluding solo. But these moments are but brief flashes on an album with a runtime of eighty minutes. The rest is so dull and monotonous that the white bricks that make up the cover art do a better job describing the music than I can with words.
The album ends with Outside the Wall, which fittingly concludes the story with a message of hollow sentimentalism delivered in a whimpering tone. The album's final lyrics are continued in the first line of the opening song, creating a circularity to the story that suggests that the entire exercise has been futile. Dismal and uninspired, The Wall casts a long shadow on the band's earlier releases.
