Sunday, May 24, 2015

23. Pink Floyd - The Wall


Flickr Download DeviantArt


The original album cover art design of The Wall is a white brick wall with no text. Roger Waters had fallen out with Hipgnosis designer Storm Thorgerson.
Later CD covers would bear the band's name and album title in either black or red text.

For this work, I have added two images from the movie The Wall and a fan-made calligraphy. The additional text is mine.


The Wall is a story of alienation, oppression, isolation, despair and bombing out. A wall is a symbol of separation, restriction and exclusion. It sends a message that means containment, 
debasement, lack of freedom and the forced imposition of someone else's will on another. Yet the human spirit is surprisingly insurmountable and history is replete with the fall
of famous walls. The walled city of Babylon was considered impregnable during its time until Cyrus the Great diverted the Euphrates River to lower its water level and thus 
enabled his army to enter the city through the river bed. The Storming of the Bastille was the flashpoint of the French Revolution. The Wall concert was one of the
events that marked celebrations over the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. 

Dynasties have built walls to contain themselves, exclude others or otherwise prove that what are within those walls are theirs. The erection of walls have
always been accompanied by blatant displays of power and have often been served in conflict and ushered in dominance and servitude. But for every
whack of the whip of authority is an echo of disillusionment, dismemberment and disintegration. The only man-made structure that is visible
from the dark side of the moon may yet be the next to fall.


"We don't need no thought control."


No. 16, Billboard, The 300 Best-Selling Albums of All Time; No. 30, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000;
No. 47, Rate Your Music, The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 87, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.


Design by Gerald Scarfe. Album produced by Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie and Roger Waters. Harvest/EMI 1979.


Pink Floyd's the Wall is one of the most intriguing and imaginative albums in the history of rock music. Since the studio album's release in 1979, the tour of 1980-81, and the subsequent
movie of 1982, the Wall has become synonymous with, if not the very definition of, the term "concept album." Aurally explosive on record, astoundingly complex on stage, and visually
explosive on the screen, the Wall traces the life of the fictional protagonist, Pink Floyd, from his boyhood days in post-World-War-II England to his self-imposed isolation as a 
world-renowned rock star, leading to a climax that is as cathartic as it is destructive. Full article


(A) In the Flesh? - The Thin Ice - Another Brick in the Wall (Part I) - The Happiest Days of Our Lives - Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) - Mother

(B) Goodbye Blue Sky - Empty Spaces - Young Lust - One of My Turns - Don't Leave Me Now - Another Brick in the Wall (Part III) - Goodbye Cruel World

(C) Hey You - Is There Anybody Out There? - Nobody Home - Vera - Bring the Boys Back Home - Comfortably Numb

(D) The Show Must Go On - In the Flesh - Run Like Hell - Waiting for the Worms - Stop - The Trial - Outside the Wall



"Another Brick in the Wall" from mongchilde on YouTube.