Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis

If you're a casual PF fan, I'd recommend two overlooked albums of the 70's - Meddle and Animals. Meddle is probably the first album to sound like what the public recognizes as Pink Floyd.

Animals is, to me, a masterpiece. Gilmour and Wright, especially, are amazing. It's dark and cynical, but maybe not as hopeless as The Wall. "Dogs" may be the best guitar work Gilmour has ever done, aside from "Comfortably Numb". Sadly, it seems like most of the band didn't like Waters controlling behavior and the dark turn his lyrics took on this album.

Well anyway about 15 years ago I’m showing the old man YouTube for the first time. And I ask him, is there any old memories we should go look up, he says, see if there’s any videos from The Wall. And there is! An entire bootleg of the concert from 1981. It was magical, I gave my dad a Time Machine.

Thanks YouTube!

Growing up in a developing country, where rock music wasn't really the preferred or even the available kind, _The Wall_ was foundational to me as a young teen and in early college years. The angst, the lyrics, the music - I drank heavy doses of Pink Floyd with whatever was available (bootleg cassette tapes, mostly, listened to on portable tape players and boomboxes). Much later did I learn that the original PF foursome had disbanded even before I started listening to them. That was a crushing blow :-( Those were the pre pre-Internet days.

I still listen to PF today, roughly 30+ years after I first heard them. And still find new nuances that I eluded my initial thousand listens.

Thanks for posting this <3 You've made at least one person nostalgic. And happy.

I used to email the owner a long time ago when I was really getting into Pink Floyd in high school. It was one of the first times I can really recall about having long, ongoing conversations online about something I was becoming increasingly passionate about. I really enjoyed the debate and back and forth that they were willing to entertain with me.

Sadly it looks like those conversations have been lost to time/old email addresses. But the idea that people would be open and willing to chat about their hobbies is really what defined the internet to me of that age.

"We're going to listen to something, and I don't want to say anything until it's done", he said. Then he proceeded to play "A Momentary Lapse of Reason". It changed my life.

It was the first time I realised you can listen to music like you'd watch a film. The depth of the soundscapes still influence me as a musician today.

Thanks dad.

Bear in mind, this guy also paddled the hell out of a kid who threw a pencil ("you could blind someone that way!") And by paddle, I mean a cricket-bat sized piece of wood, hands up against the lockers. Teacher, leave them kids alone!

I have never forgotten that long intense drive home, in the summer, with no air conditioning, and playing Pink Floyd on full volume the whole way.

Because of this, "The Wall" has always been Floyd's second best album.

A Rolling Stone Magazine writer once said something like "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." So, good writing about music deserves appreciation.

so you think you can tell

anylise that

Try Roger Waters' “The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking”, the album that nearly was instead of The Wall.

From Wikipedia:

In July 1978, Waters presented the concepts and played demos of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking as well as what was then titled Bricks in the Wall, which became The Wall, to his bandmates in Pink Floyd, asking them to decide which should be a group album, and which should be his solo album. After a long debate, they decided that they preferred the concept of Bricks in the Wall, even though their manager at the time, Steve O'Rourke, thought that Pros and Cons was a better-sounding concept, and David Gilmour deemed Pros and Cons stronger musically.

The entire story is framed in real time as a fitful dream taking place in the early morning hours of 4:30:18 am to 5:12:32 am on an unspecified day. ...

Eric Clapton plays lead guitar, David Sandborn sax, and Michael Kamen piano (plus his orchestra).

It's worth the time, if for no other reason than to see if your experience is the same as Rolling Stone's:

Roger Waters' first official solo album will be of sustained interest mainly to postanalytic Pink Floyd fetishists and other highly evolved neurotics who persist in seeking spiritual significance amid the flotsam of English art rock. I can't imagine that anyone else will sit more than once through this strangely static, faintly hideous record, on which Waters' customary bile is, for the first time, diluted with musical bilge.

No "highly evolved neurotics" here, of course.