129. Pink Floyd, "The Wall"
First off: love the subway tile!
This album is as stark an example as I've seen here of the difference between how an album hit me when I was 14 and how it hits now. When I was a sullen teen, I thought this record was so fucking deep - you know, man, we really do build a Wall between ourselves and the world, this is so amazing, how do they know exactly what I'm feeling? I had the whole cliche down - lying on my back in my room with The Wall blasting in headphones and just reveling in my suffering and aloneness. Typical privileged suburban kid.
So yesterday I listen to this album again all the way through for the first time in like 30 years and now it doesn't sound like a monumental work of art that also happens to just get me. Now it sounds like an incredibly self-indulgent, overwrought work of art with some definite high points but also some serious flaws.
To back up, this album is, of course, one of the best-selling records of all time, and, incredibly, is only Pink Floyd's second best-selling album (behind Dark Side of the Moon, which we will surely see). Once you know the backstory - recorded by a band in the process of irreversibly fracturing, commandeered by an ego so monstrous (that of Roger Waters, of course) that it drove one band member (keyboardist Rick Wright) out of the band during the recording process - it makes more sense. It's a concept album, of course (remember those?) that loosely tells the story of Pink, a rock musician raised by, you guessed it, a difficult mother, who isolates himself from the world. To that end, Waters' lyrics are suitably dejected:
On the thin ice of modern life
Dragging behind you the silent reproach
Of a million tear-stained eyes
Don't be surprised,
When a crack in the ice
Appears under your feet
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind
With your fear flowing out behind you
As you claw the thin ice
The album spawned Floyd's only number one US single, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," an absolutely iconic song and probably the song most people would start humming if you asked them to name a Pink Floyd song. Like a lot of the songs on the album, it really doesn't have a lot of lyrics. It's basically just:
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave them kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
There's also "Comfortably Numb," another one of the band's best-known songs. It originally started off meant for guitarist David Gilmour's solo album but found its way here. But for my money, the best song on here is probably "Nobody Home," a sad ballad that's largely about departed band member Syd Barrett, who descended into profound mental illness. I think lyrically it's the most deft song and has a great melody and is just produced so well. Waters also manages to restrain his strangles scream-voice, which makes a few too many appearances.
Like I said, the band was coming apart at the seams as this album was being recorded. "Run Like Hell," another one of the better songs on the album, was the last time the band recorded a song together with the core lineup of Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Nick Mason on drums. During the subsequent tour - and this is such a great fucking detail - the band members each had separate RVs, parked with the doors facing away from each other. Waters himself would arrive at the shows by helicopter; fuck a limo.
Anyway, this album, which came out at the very end of the 70's, is a great capsule of that era of prog indulgence and excess, when you could give a band a million dollars and a year to record an album and they'd go off and fight and take drugs and get divorced and kick each other out and refuse to speak and all that great 70's rock star shit. And then write a whole album about the experience of being a rich and disaffected rock star! The mind reels.
Toni Tennille sings backup on a few of the tracks, a detail I did not know but which I now am saving for any rock trivia contest I shall participate in.
Is this album in my personal Top 500? 500 is a lot so I guess so, but I was surprised by how much less I liked it at this point in my life.
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