A monument of ego and genius
You don’t listen to The Wall. You live in it. You crawl through room by room, brick by brick, until the air gets too thick and the voice inside your head starts sounding an awful lot like Roger Waters. Released in 1979 at the arse-end of a decade weighed down by ego, paranoia, and disco balls, The Wall was less an album and more a psycho-architecture. Yes, a rock opera—but not the swashbuckling type. Opera as self-evisceration was like this.
It started with Waters sketching the design of estrangement, disillusionment, and identity breakdown—mostly his own—but he draped it in the fictitious skin of “Pink,” a character who was partly stand-in, partly warning, partly ghost. Under the guidance of producer Bob Ezrin, the band, broken and almost not speaking, gathered to create one of the most ambitious, enclosed, and costly albums in rock history. Out of tension and tape reels somehow emerged a masterpiece.
Still, the hooks are indisputable. With its anti-authoritarian chorus sung by a children’s choir with startling accuracy, Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) turned into a chart-busting anthem. Comfortably Numb is next, with David Gilmour’s guitar solo sounding more like it’s bleeding from the soul than like it’s played. Each track is another path in the labyrinth, haunted by remorse, fury, or resignation; Hey You, Mother, Run Like Hell. This was not Pink Floyd spinning into space. Here was them searching the ground.
The Wall leaps to life with a relentless lyrical rage that’s clearly genuine and, in its painstaking particularity, ultimately horrifying.
(Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, 1980)
The way The Wall captured the cultural anxiety of its age is what gives it such lasting appeal. America was hungover from Watergate and Vietnam, while Britain teetered on Thatcherism. Once psychedelic travelers, Pink Floyd had focused their camera within; the result was a portrayal of solitude in an era of media din. The wall was politically, existentially, and painfully known.
It certainly torn them apart. The tour was a logistical and emotional mess. During the recording, Wright was let go. Waters would shortly depart. Later, Gilmour would claim the entire affair was “grim.” Still, The Wall persists not in spite of its heaviness but rather because of it. Set on vinyl and given orchestral grandeur and post-punk dread, it is rock’s most complex decomposition. Turning self-pity into an art form, this concept album so perfect, so insular made the entire globe hum along.
