The Wall: Explained for Normal People
The Wall is a rock opera by the British psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd, released on November 30, 1979. It was written and composed primarily by Roger Waters. It was conceived after an incident during Floyd’s In the Flesh tour, where Waters became so angry at a rabid fan that he spat in his face. In the hotel room later that night, the weight of his actions crushed him and he started looking back on his life for the roots of this behavior, eventually drafting a story about a fictionalized version of himself being screwed up by a bad childhood and isolating himself from society. This grew into a double album, receiving positive reviews at time of release and gaining an even better reputation as time went on. It contains three of Floyd’s most famous songs (“Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,” “Comfortably Numb,” and “Run Like Hell”) and is their best-selling album behind Dark Side of the Moon. It was adapted by Alan Parker into the cult classic film Pink Floyd - The Wall.
The story of The Wall can be confusing and inaccessible to people who aren’t used to albums as a format of storytelling, and even then there’s a lot to dig into. This is a guide to help people who aren’t freaks like me understand and enjoy this album. It contains subjective interpretations, but is by no means an exhaustive analysis, just a plain language summary. Enjoy.
There’s a guy named Pink. His childhood is crap. He gets married and becomes a rock star. Neither of these things go well. The terribleness of his life crashes in on him, so he uses those events (the bricks) to build a metaphorical wall around himself. It turns out complete social and psychological isolation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He turns to drugs. He gets so high before a concert that he becomes a fascist dictator. After a political rampage, he realizes that it’s not his upbringings fault he’s such a terrible person, it’s his. He puts himself on trial, and concludes that his only suitable punishment is to tear down the wall. Then this happens all over again. Forever. OR DOES IT?!?
This is covering the album. The movie is a whole different beast with additional symbolism I don’t have the time or brain power to get into. Even the album is a lot more complex than this, but hopefully this will give you a head start on figuring it out.
A revisionist flash forward, if that makes any sense. Pink, as a fascist dictator, bellows at his audience. In this case, the audience is not only his loyal supporters but the listener of the album. He invites you to “the show,” a tour of his life. He doesn’t just tell you, he DROPS it on you.
And yes, that WAS a faint voice at the very start saying “…we came in?” The album ends on the same faint voice saying “Isn’t this where…” Bookending is very common in Floyd’s 70s catalogue, and The Wall’s hidden message of “Isn’t this where…we came in?”, besides making an endless loop of the album feasible, is also what splits pessimistic and optimistic interpretations of this album.
None of that matters right now. Basically, welcome to the show.
Pink is born in 1943. An extremely helpful narrator (possibly himself, speaking in hindsight) tells him that he shouldn’t expect much out of the ice of life, just a lot of cracks.
Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1
Pink’s father is killed in World War 2. To cope, Pink puts up a mental defense mechanism: distance and apathy. This initial pain provides the first bricks for his mental wall, a wall that will gather more and more bricks from the pains of life, causing Pink to retreat deeper and deeper into himself.
The Happiest Days of Our Lives
Pink elaborates on his unpleasant childhood by turning from one government institution (the army) to another (school). His teachers were psychologically abusive, putting down and humiliating their students whenever they were given the opportunity. As some measure of compensation, they got smacked around by their wives a lot. More than anything, they suppressed individualism, forcing their students to conform into…
Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2
…uniform, faceless bricks. The “wall” this time is twofold: the wall of society, which tries to squish Pink into a meaningless statistic like his dead father, and Pink’s personal wall, which this process has provided bricks for. If he can’t trust society, who can he trust?
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