Pink Floyd - The Wall: Classic or Dud?

Try pre-maturely grizzled middle-aged rocker depression, actually.

....in Chalfont".

About sums it up

Is the movie necessary to provide context for the album? Part of me feels it might be, say for someone who knows nothing about it. Then again the giant animated vagina sequence DID scar me for life.

no, particularly since the movie didn't come out until three years after the album

I rather like earlier Floyd, but this is the album where the music truly broke under the weight of Waters' pretensions.

I agree with most people here in that I used to listen to and enjoy this a lot when I was young, but haven't felt a need to hear it for years and years now. I still haven't ever heard Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

The film, at least, set off great a controvesy over the rumour that if one shaved off one's eyebrows, they'd never grow back. A whole generation watched LiveAid trying to determine if Bob Geldolf was wearing eyebrow-toupees.

As for the album as a whole, I'm often amused by the idea that Roger Waters thought people would indulge him to the extent that he could do a double album about how horrible his life had been. On that level I can enjoy it because it's so titanically ridiculous. But there are too many words on it and not enough spacing out, so I'd rather listen to "Dogs" or "Echoes".

One thing that's always disappointed me about The Wall is that the extended movie version of "Empty Spaces" is nowhere to be found. I mean, the heaviest song on the album and it's not on the album at all! Gaah.

"heaviest"?

I saw a bootleg vinyl copy of The Wall: The Soundtrack a long time ago at a record show. It had "Empty Spaces" on it, and dammit, I wish I had bought the damn thing for the twelve bucks or whatever.

Damn you, Pleasant, I was just about to say..

a long time ago a friend bought me an 80 min. CD xfer of the digital audio from the Wall LD, and since that day it has become, for me, the definitive version of the Wall which I listen to. It includes "When the Tigers Broke Free" and the "Empty Spaces" and loses a couple of trivial things. It has bit of dialog and sfx from the film mixed in brilliantly, and by comparison, listening to the traditional album feels, well, flat.

only annoyance: Bob Geldof's voice on "In the Flesh" isn't as good as Roger's.

I just like the part where it fillls him with the urge to defacate. Because really, your misanthropic concept album doesn't really become high art until you garnish it with a poop joke.

"heaviest"?

Big and loud and guitar-y without being an utter heap of shit like "Young Lust."

Dud.

Either it hasn't aged well...or I have.

The only things lazier and more self-indulgent than this record are the vast majority of shit posts on this thread. At least you could hope for a few brave defenses of this -- that perhaps the fascist fantasies were kind of an interesting take on what stadium rock had become by 1979, that as insufferable as Waters was by this point the music he wrote (esp. the stuff w/ Gilmour) is uncommonly tuneful. Or perhaps, to really zoom back for a second, that The Wall was the exact point at which The Beatles Moment (from the standpoint that pop, culture and society went hand in hand) went up its own ass, never to return really.

Instead, let's all bitch about Roger.

Regardless, I haven't listened to this for ages, though YouTube has some frankly excellent live vids of "Young Lust," "Run Like Hell" and others from 1980:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGY53APNiM&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYd6mCAcQw8&mode=related&search=

Maybe people here can find new ways to complain about these.

Ok, I'll expand on that thought for a second.

Watch the video of "Hey You" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1yD9avOGgM

Nothing happens for the first four minutes -- it's just some stuffed animal in "pain" while the song drones on and on. When Roger comes in to sing the finale, he's singing behind the 30' wall w/ the band in a cage-thing behind him.

It's utterly impossible to look at this video without thinking how much it's all about HIM. Yes, calling the record solipsistic isn't anything new. But if you think about this in a broader, cultural context, The Wall just might have been the moment at which pop music, despite all its portent, went back to being what it had been until The Beatles:

Entertainment.

My two cents anyway.

i go back to this album every few years to feel like a 13 year old and it works for that. classic

classic for all the right reasons.

I went through a phase of hating it, but now I think maybe it's just a good album unnecessarily bloated into a double.

Sampled by Kate Bush, therefore classic.

What sample?

apparently the helicopter sound in waking the witch is from the wall, but they sound different to me. in fact, i'm not sure I remember a helicopter sound in the wall at all

in fact, i'm not sure I remember a helicopter sound in the wall at all

Right in between "Another Brick In The Wall (Pt.1)" and "The Happiest Days of Our Lifes" (when the Teacher character is screaming STAND STILL, LADDIE!. Or something.

oh right. well it might have been the same helicopter sound from the same source, but it doesn't sound lifted from the album per se.

I don't appreciate being led by the hand through The Wall via "music concrete"
Its extremely off-putting and unnecessary with such a work
and Its too much Roger Waters pretension, story-telling and ego; not enough Gilmour brilliance; or Rick Wright accessibility.
Also, everything classic by the Floyd, with the exception of Dark Side(A notable exception, I know) invoked the memory of Syd, and this was never going to be another Dark Side.
Maybe when they recorded/wrote with him in mind, they had him on their mind, overlooking them, therefore filtering out all this Waters Bollocks.
Although mild applause for 'Pros and Cons'

Gilmour brilliance

i'm still trying to wrap my head around this...like trying to imagine dry water.

Oh please. Dave Gilmour is an exceptional guitarist -- like him or not.

Gilmour brilliance

i'm still trying to wrap my head around this...like trying to imagine dry water.

-- Lawrence the Looter, Wednesday, 26 September 2007 00:05

cold.

dark side doesn't invoke syd? what's "brain damage" about then?

Richard Wright was more or less thrown out of the group by the time, which is why "The Wall" doesn't work out. It would have benefited from synths being more prominent, like on "Dark Side Of The Moon" and "Wish You Were Here".

-- Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Friday, February 10, 2006 6:36 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

^^^^^^^^
every now and then, geir is 1,000% OTM.

i love the wall and find it to be a very potent work. some fantastic songwriting and arrangements with a really cohesive narrative holding the whole thing together. the concept is definitely the product of a very self-absorbed individual, but it works well in terms of touching on more universal themes, such as loss, loneliness, and lethargy.

Only makes sense to me in context with the movie. As a musical item it is frankly poor.

Well, it predates the film rather significantly, you realize.

Then what I really meant is that the movie is definitely a classic but the soundtrack is dud.

"Comfortably Numb" plus a load of stuff I never need to hear. Might be interesting to listen to it all thru again now. Remember the film being A Bit Rub.

kind of sad, people who don't get how much this album rules

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