REBUILDING "THE WALL"

Pink Floyd The Wall Pink Floyd's album "The Wall" was written during a dreary time in 1979. A struggling economy dominated headlines, rubbish piled in the street, unemployment soared, and England's "winter of discontent" swept Margaret Thatcher to power. "The Wall" expressed a dark sense of this ugly modern age, and one man's desire to turn away from it all.

That man was Roger Waters, Pink Floyd's bassist, whose life and experiences inspired the characters of this rock opera. As Jon Pareles writes in the New York Times:

“The Wall” tells the story of a rock star, Mr. Pink Floyd. It touches on the death of his father (in World War II), vicious schoolmasters, a clinging mother, infidelity, divorce, rock-star excesses and the hollowness, paranoia and demagoguery of fame. Fears and drugs combine to wall him away from the world, until, after a surreal trial, the wall crumbles to both expose him and restore his humanity. “I was a miserable young man all those years ago,” Mr. Waters told the audience on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. “I’m happier now,” he added, to moderate applause.

For the show's 30th anniversary international tour, Waters expands the album's conceit to include more contemporary concerns, such as the conflict between East and West, and a political climate of fear. "The story could be broadened as an allegory for what goes on in the political scene around the world," Waters said in an interview recently.

If the original concept of "The Wall" was a stretch, this reworked version shows a complete disregard for plot and coherence, and attempts to compensate for this by intensifying the spectacle. At the show's September premiere in Toronto, the drafty reaches of the Air Canada stadium rattled with sound effects, while a huge white wall featured slick cinematic projections. The effect was exhilarating but vacuous. The show ably whips its audience up in a frenzy of outrage against the forces of evil, but we never quite learn what those forces are.

Waters wants his new production to be culturally significant. But the current forces of contemporary culture don't really accommodate serious political engagement in music. This was more acceptable in the 1970s, when punk was realpolitik and protest songs by Joan Baez, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye could reach a sympathetic mainstream. But the musical landscape changed in the 1980s. The legacy left by Live Aid is one of good intentions gone horribly awry. Though Bono and Shakira may travel the world talking about developmental philanthropy, the perils of worthiness weigh heavy on rock stars with lofty, conceptual ideas. These days the big stars tend to employ spectacle to titillate and entertain, with little intellectual pretext.

The last ever progressive concept album, "The Wall" was outdated even in its time. By 1979 punk rock had trashed the charts, barking in the face of the longwinded, thematic albums of the '70s. More recently, the album format itself has been called into question. We buy the tracks we like, we build playlists, we download new songs. Technology no longer stipulates the order and time in which we consume music. These changes spell doom for concept albums—especially ones sprawled over four sides of vinyl.

I've heard "The Wall" described as "the ultimate coming-of-age album". As paeans to adolescence go, there are few more dramatic than the tale of a man who builds a wall between him and the world. For all its flaws, it's also a reminder of another era—one in which pop music was unafraid of courting politics. If nothing else, these things make "The Wall" a bit of history worth revisiting, perhaps for the last time.

Tour dates available here.

~ HAZEL SHEFFIELD

Picture Credit: exquisitur (via Flickr)