While there are moments when we hear classic Pink Floyd tropes borrowed from earlier works, the soundscape is generally more diverse than previous efforts, incorporating styles as diverse as doo-wop and operetta. The music supports this quest for unity through strong repeating motifs, slightly different versions of songs in different contexts (“In the Flesh” and “Another Brick in the Wall”) and the heavy use of crossfades from one song to the next. ”) recirculating to the work’s opening lyrical fragment (“we came in?”). I have never trashed a hotel room, but I will admit to smashing a few pieces of crockery in my time.Īs a musical composition, I can understand why Waters said in 2018, “To date, The Wall is my finest musical achievement.” Like Finnegan’s Wake, the narrative is circular, with the closing fragment (“Isn’t this where. We may not be able to relate to the specific experiences described in The Wall, but we can relate to the feeling of not fitting in, not being accepted for who we are and the tendency to turn inside when the world burdens us with unreasonable expectations. And the more energy we put into building that wall, the weirder we get. Although few among us have ever experienced life as a rock star, all of us have built walls to shield ourselves from something in the outside world we have identified as either dangerous or strange.
The most obvious upside is that The Wall features a coherent psychological narrative that most people can follow. Waters’ success with this device is hit-and-miss, and sometimes The Wall sometimes feels more like the transcript of a therapy session than a story designed to enlighten us through shared human experience. Many authors have used a character to relate one’s personal experience in order to create the distance necessary to achieve negative capability (Nick Calloway in The Great Gatsby, for example). “Oh, by the way, which one’s Pink?” queried the oblivious record company mogul in “Have a Cigar.” Waters’ decided to run with that slight and use it both as a symbol of depersonalization and a way to provide distance between self and story. He attempts to correct for over-personalization by using a character named Pink to tell the tale. The story is largely autobiographical-Waters’ father was killed in the war, he was raised by his mother, he was bullied in school, and the rock star experience described in the narrative reflects Waters’ personal disillusionment with fame and the consequent disconnection from the human race.
Roger Waters, on the other hand, was seriously impeded in his creation of The Wall by an identity of his own with strong personal opinions that affected the independence of the lead character he created. Shakespeare’s true genius lies in the fact that he never wrote his autobiography.
PINK FLOYD THE WALL ALBUM REVIEW SERIAL
For all we know he could have been a serial murderer like Macbeth. We don’t know if old Willie was constantly beset by doubts like Hamlet or had a jealous streak like Othello or had a drinking problem like Falstaff, so we don’t really know how much his personal opinions or real-life experience influenced the nature of the characters he created. ” and references to local legends and third-hand accounts.
PINK FLOYD THE WALL ALBUM REVIEW FULL
Any biographical information on Shakespeare is full of phrases like “scholars believe that. This perception of Shakespeare is enhanced a thousandfold by the simple fact that we still don’t know much about the guy.
Shakespeare had gusto because he was not impeded in this work by an identity of his own, with personal opinions that might have affected the independence and freedom of the characters he created.
The result of negative capability is what he called “gusto” in the quote above. He specifically mentions Shakespeare’s work as the example of negative capability par excellence. Keats described negative capability as the state of mind “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” asserting that such a state is essential to achieving literary greatness. Great poets, argued Keats, had gusto because they were not impeded in their work by an identity of their own, with personal opinions that might affect the independence and freedom of the characters they create: a poet, he told Woodhouse, ‘has no Identity – he is continually informing and filling some other Body’. From the essay “John Keats and ‘negative capability” by Stephen Hebron, via the British Library:
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