The Wall

-->

Pink Floyd is considered one of the most influential bands of the 60’s and 70’s, this fame is due in part to their most famous and most widely debated over album, “The Wall”. Instead of making a few songs and selling them together in an album, Pink Floyd created an album about an entire life’s story where each song is another phase of the persons life. The album contains 26 songs so I am unable to analyze each one, but I encourage everyone to listen to it in order and to take away some meaning from it.

            The album is about Mr. Pink and it starts with the song “In the Flesh?”, this song represents Pinks birth into a harsh world and “the message sets up the theme of expectation and disappointment”. This is a short song and  the lyrics are;

So ya thought ya
Might like to go to the show
To feel the warm thrill of confusion,
That space cadet glow.
Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes
You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise.

What most people take away from this is that Pink wanted to go to the show (life) and feel the “warmth” or love and happiness it contained. Instead he was disappointed when the love eluded him and he found a world full of “cold eyes”. The third song in the album is called “Another Brick in the Wall part 1”, this is where we begin to see The Wall. What we associate with walls is the act of separating things, and even though this is not a real wall, it still does the same thing. In this song, Pink is a child and his father just left (presumably to go to war) and “leaving just a memory, a snapshot in the family album”. So this traumatic experience of his father leaving is when he begins to build his wall, to hide him from the harsh reality of the world. In the 4^th and 5^th songs, Pink describes how his teachers would try to beat the individuality out of the students and how this added more bricks to his wall. Eventually he builds a great big wall and completely isolates himself from the world, only to question if this was the right choice and he begins to feel the consequences of his self imposed reclusion. Late in the album Pink goes insane because of how his walls have kept him from living, he then realizes he put up the walls himself and orders them taken down. “The Moral of the Story: Though there will almost always be personal and social barriers erected out of fear, oppression, pain, and isolation, it's the job of every socially conscious individual and community to never rest in tearing down the walls that separate us.”

            Although there is a lot more metaphors and symbolism that have yet to be explained, the main them is pretty evident. And that is what is so special about this album, the fact that it is all related and it all serves the purpose of making the audience listen to the lyrics and to think about it as well as their own lives. This album changed the music industry forever and there will never be another one like it.

Works Cited,

 "LexisNexis® Academic & Library Solutions." LexisNexis® Academic & Library Solutions. N.p., 10 Mar. 1980. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. <http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic/?verb=sr>.

 "In the Flesh? - Pink Floyd's "The Wall": A Complete Analysis." In the Flesh? - Pink Floyd's "The Wall": A Complete Analysis. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. <http://www.thewallanalysis.com/main/in-the-flesh1.html>.