Pink Floyd
The Wall

THE REVIEW

Pink Floyd is one of the most well-known musical groups of the last forty years and, as is well known, they have steered rock from the acidic psychedelia of the origins to progressive territories, ultimately achieving, by the late '70s, a personal synthesis between symphonic rock and avant-garde music, while still crafting the production and sound in such a way as to make their albums easily accessible to large segments of the youth and beyond. It's no coincidence that their albums from the "Dark Side of The Moon" period to this "The Wall" became best-sellers, and in some cases, even long-sellers.

The Wall is perhaps the most popular and renowned album by the group, although not the best-selling, and it greatly contributed, also thanks to the film of the same name by Alan Parker and the concerts of the leader and bassist Roger Waters during the fall of the Berlin Wall, to bringing the band's language and poetics beyond the confines of the more or less narrow circle of music enthusiasts, to the point of becoming almost a news story.

It is a theme album, or Concept, in which all the songs are linked to each other in terms of lyrics, creating a single narrative fresco, and in which the music itself, understood as melodies and especially as arrangements, is compacted around themes that often recur, or otherwise atmospheres that give continuity to the entire (double) album.

I would prefer not to write too much on the genre and musical style, also because the album is well-known and already reviewed: if you listen to it and compare it to the group's earlier works, the sound has become much leaner and the textures of Richard Wright's keyboards are absent, yielding to a more compact and cohesive sound that revolves around the bass-drums rhythm, which sometimes adopts almost disco rhythms (Another Brick..., Run Like Hell) and the guitar interventions of David Gilmour, which stand out especially in some long solos (Comfortably Numb).

What is a substantial rhythmic and melodic poverty of the album is compensated by careful production that dramatizes the entire narrative saga and results almost in a theatrical production, thanks to a Roger Waters who often recites rather than sings, assisted in the more melodic phase by the more flexible voice of David Gilmour.

The aspect I wish to highlight is that of the narrated story, which broadly mixes the biographical events of Roger Waters (childhood, rise in the music world, resulting problems between drugs and marital dramas) and partly those of the ex-guitarist from the band's early years, Syd Barrett (alienation, progressive withdrawal from active life), in a kind of mirror game where the author's present, at the end of the '70s, is characterized by a physical, mental, and artistic dissociation from the rest of the world, almost echoing Barrett's dramas, who became mentally ill after years of psychoactive substance abuse.

The album is thus a sort of account of Waters' perdition, amidst memories of a painful childhood due to the loss of his father, the presence of an obsessive mother, inability to weave harmonious and lasting relationships with women, artistic alienation, disdain for the show biz, creativity crises, and above all, latent awareness of the risk. A commercialization of art, a planetary success, music reduced to consumer entertainment for the masses, leads the artist and the man to become nothing, in a totalitarian society.

Only a careful self-examination, in search of a truth that is probably that of Love in the highest sense of the word (Agape), can help the artist to tear down this wall. And, with the haunting words that conclude the album, "The ones who really love you /Walk up and down outside the wall/Some hand in hand/Some gathering together in bands/The bleeding hearts and the artists/Make their stand".

A difficult album, therefore, but one that nonetheless opens up to a not easily attained final hope, to a conciliatory vision that cannot but depend on abandoning drugs, perdition, and violence towards oneself and one's partner, from an idea of ​​art as a form of consumption solely geared towards profit, which feeds on the value of Love, and probably some form of Faith that the Anglican Waters does not fully realize or define but appears latent in the musical sweetness and vision with which the album ends, an implicitly religious Afterlife.

Certainly an album recommended to everyone, therefore, even if for the younger ones it is advisable to frame the events with the help of an adult and understand that the path of perdition outlined by Waters is not a necessary passage to understand Good but is a problem of the singer, who certainly does not pose as an example to follow.

Those who are already familiar with the album - and I imagine the majority of people subscribed or reading this review - reconsider the work of Pink Floyd also from the perspective of the values expressed and the interesting path that, with humility and style, the group takes to free their lives from the weaknesses and perdition that destroyed the life of their friend Syd Barrett, giving themselves a second chance.