THE WALL

The Wall has a sort of uneasy feeling to it, right from the end of the first track, In The Flesh?, to the disturbing feeling of death at the end of the album. The overall tone of the album is somewhat insane and dark; it takes you through the thoughts and feelings that the subject of it has. While it is the least instrumental and 'spacey', album of Floyd's career, at least up until '79, it contains some of the absolute essential Floyd tracks, such as Another Brick in the Wall and Comfortably Numb.

The subject of the album goes through many different stages, some of which the listener can relate to, others which they cannot. In the Flesh?, the beginning track, represents the subject's joy of stardom. The Thin Ice is a metaphor for how greed and overindulgence in a "rock n roll lifestyle" can ruin a person's life. As the album progresses, He starts to experience the feelings accompanying superstardom, such as loneliness, depression, regret, and being homesick. Being under this pressure causes him to take drugs, and then by somewhere around the end of the album he dies.

It's hard to tell exactly what happens in the album, in what order it happens, and if it actually happened or not. The death of the subject, for example. He may have tried to kill himself by overdosing while he was high on Goodbye Cruel World, and then on the other disc, on Hey You, is high, comes close to death. Then he realizes all the assorted awful things going on in a state of false enlightenment. Then on In The Flesh he is high, and goes to the show and exposes himself, and his opinions, whether they are real or not. He seems to die in Stop, hence the title, so he kills himself. He can't even be left to rest in peace. All he wanted was to become famous, but soon he couldn't take the people prying into every aspect of his life, so he killed himself. Even in death he couldn't escape them. Maybe the wall is life.

The music is slightly different from other Pink Floyd albums, and is somewhat of a 1979 crossover album. Less deep lyics and shorter, less spacey tunes, and no sax, would have been more appealing to music fans other than the regular prog fans, while still keeping the old Floyd fans. Run Like Hell would be a song that is more danceable, more upbeat and, dreadfully, more disco- influenced. Pink Floyd didn't drop the meaning of the album though; it was captured wholly through the songs, the lyrics and the way they were played.