Pink Floyd - The Wall: Classic or Dud?

Dark Sides is overated dreck, too.

[sorry that was a cameo appearance from me in 7th grade]

[still though it's better than 'the final cut', that shit reex]

now that i've put everyone asleep, the WORLD IS MINE!

I also listened to it about a week ago, and realised that it's a huge crock of shit. It's too slow and morbid and pointless. The songwriting wasn't as good as I remembered, and guitarwork certainly wasn't as good as I remembered, and the whole thing reeked of "look how clever I am".

Full marks to the guy who said it's a clud. Yes, it's a classic, as it speaks to the disaffected teenager as well as anything, but it's also a dud, because it seesm to appeal to this lowest denominator, and go no further.

On the other hand, I suppose a classic is something you would listen to over and over again, and a dud is something you would never want to infect your eardrums as long as you live. Since I don't want to ever hear The Wall again, I would have to say dud.

But I have fond memories of this album . . . aaaaaaaaah!

Rock masterpiece.

Final cut wasn't great though, and neither was the division bell.

Great guitar solo nobody ever mentions: "Is There Anybody Out There?"

"Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Send your answer to Old Pink in care of the funny farm."

"Old Pink, Carolyn is on the phone."

let's all go to the laser-dome.

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.