Follow TV Tropes

Following

Context YMMV / TheWall

Go To

1[[WMG:[[center:[-Music/PinkFloyd '''[[YMMV/PinkFloyd Main YMMV Page]]'''\
2''YMMV/ThePiperAtTheGatesOfDawn'' | ''YMMV/{{Ummagumma}}'' | ''YMMV/AtomHeartMother'' | ''YMMV/{{Meddle}}'' | ''YMMV/ObscuredByClouds'' | ''YMMV/TheDarkSideOfTheMoon''\
3''YMMV/{{Wish You Were Here|1975}}'' | ''YMMV/{{Animals|1977}}'' | '''''The Wall''''' | ''YMMV/TheFinalCut'' | ''YMMV/AMomentaryLapseOfReason'' | ''YMMV/TheDivisionBell'' | ''YMMV/TheEndlessRiver''-]]]]]
4----
5* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation:
6** The Trial sequence: Pink's personal despairing nightmare of being judged, or his subconscious' moment of personal triumph in having the strength to look at himself honestly at last and then destroy the Wall with the help of the "Bleeding Hearts and Artists" outside who never lost faith in him?
7** The album ''runs on it''. Pink's biggest failing is that he never really stopped to think about ''why'' his bricks acted the way they did.
8** The film does this with "Young Lust". On the album, the song (which details Pink having casual sex with groupies while on tour) ends with Pink calling his wife from America only to have a man answer the phone and the phone operator having a very concerned reaction to the situation. In the film, the song ''starts'' with the phone call, which leads Pink to attempt to have sex with a groupie rather than already having him cheat.
9* AluminumChristmasTrees: If the idea of a rock star turning a concert into a neo-fascist rally sounds ridiculous, remember that Music/EricClapton delivered a racist rant on-stage in Birmingham in 1976. In another parallel with Pink, he was very drunk at the time. Music/DavidBowie had also toyed with fascist imagery in the ''Music/StationToStation'' era with his "Thin White Duke" persona, and once infamously advocated the idea of a fascist Britain during an in-character interview. One notorious photo also appears to depict Bowie giving the Nazi salute (Bowie and eyewitnesses attest that he was simply photographed mid-wave). Bowie deeply regretted the Thin White Duke fiasco and, similarly to Pink's predicament, attributed it to psychosis induced by heavy cocaine use.
10* AndYouThoughtItWouldFail: When executives at Creator/ColumbiaRecords, the band's U.S. label at the time, heard the finished album, they were apparently unimpressed. The label balked at releasing a double album, proposing reduced royalties. One exec even proposed flipping a coin with Roger Waters, but Waters refused, saying that he shouldn't have to gamble on something he owned. The label backed down, and the album became one of the band's most popular, becoming the highest-selling double-album of all time.
11* AwardSnub: The only Grammy it won was for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical. The Grammys it lost, and what they lost ''to''? Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal? Lost to Music/BobSeger and the Silver Bullet Band's ''Against the Wind''. Album of the Year? Lost to Christopher Cross's self-titled debut album. The latter is particularly infamous among both fans and music historians thanks to the greater public longevity of ''The Wall'' compared to ''Christopher Cross'', which despite its contemporary popularity is only widely remembered decades later for being the first digitally recorded album to chart in the US. Ironically, ''Christopher Cross'' was also one of the nominees for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical.
12* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic:
13** While the entire album is a good contender, some song examples include: "Another Brick in the Wall" (all parts); "One Of My Turns"; "Hey You"; "What Shall We Do Now?" from the movie; "Comfortably Numb"; "Run Like Hell"; and "The Trial".
14** "Bring The Boys Back Home", [[WordOfGod the central song of the album according to Roger Waters]]. The gloating chorus delivering its hopeful message over a flamboyant orchestral march constitutes for half a minute the most optimistic moment of an otherwise dark album... [[MoodWhiplash right up until the point that the choir drops out and reveals that Pink has been singing along the whole time in a voice that communicates]] ''[[MoodWhiplash pure agony]]''. [[AdaptationExpansion And the film version makes it even better]].
15* CommonKnowledge: Many people think that the "Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2) sequence of the movie is the actual promo clip due to a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U VH1 Classic recording of it]] (identified by the channel as a music video) gaining nearly 400 million views and everyone can't name the "Happiest Days" song. In fact, it's actually [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY this simpler one]].
16* CreatorWorship:
17** The reason this album was created. Roger (and the audience) started seeing himself as a godlike being, above and disconnected from the fans. This culminated in the spitting incident that inspired this album. As the analysis linked to on the main page put it:
18--->Waters was obviously horrified both by his own actions and the idea of an audience so blindly obedient to the idea of celebrity that they would gladly be "blown to bits"...or even spit upon.
19** The original demo lyrics of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)", as heard on the 2011 ''Immersion'' box set edition make the theme more obvious.
20--->'''First verse''': ''We don't need your adulation''
21--->''We don't need your starry gaze''
22--->''How the years have come between us''
23--->''You should have seen them in the early days''
24--->'''Second verse''': ''They don't need your reminiscing''
25--->''They don't need your memories''
26--->''They don't want to hear who's missing''
27--->''Ya should have seen them when the boys were young''
28* CultClassic: The film adaptation of the album became a staple of the "midnight movie" circuit in the 1980s.
29* EpicRiff: "Comfortably Numb" and "Run Like Hell". It's no accident that David Gilmour co-wrote both tunes.
30* {{Fanon}}:
31** Pink's real name is Floyd Pinkerton. Never definitively confirmed, but the film ''does'' give his late father's name as "J.H. Pinkerton", apparently establishing "Pinkerton" as his surname.
32** Pink attempted suicide sometime after the events of the story, prompting him to finally seek therapy for his mental issues. This one is based on the popular interpretation that the title track from ''The Final Cut'', which is about a man looking back on his life following an abortive suicide attempt, is an epilogue to ''The Wall''. "The Final Cut" ''was'' originally written for ''The Wall'' (as were a few other songs on that album), so make of that what you will.
33* FauxSymbolism: A relative aversion in that the mind screw imagery actually has well thought out meaning behind it.
34* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments: Now has [[Funny/TheWall its own page]].
35* LessDisturbingInContext: Sometimes understanding the meaning behind the bizarre imagery makes it a little less disturbing, or in some cases, just makes it more fucked up. [[http://www.thewallanalysis.com This might help.]]
36* MemeticMutation:
37** "If ye don't eat yer meat, ye can't have any pudding!"
38** "'''TEAR DOWN THE WALL!'''" [[labelnote:Explanation]]The judge's sentencing at the end of "The Trial".[[/labelnote]]
39** Like everything throughout Pink Floyd's career, Roger's eccentric screaming between "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" and "Run Like Hell".
40** "We don't need no education!"[[labelnote:Explanation]]The first line of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", which is easily the most famous song on the album.[[/labelnote]]
41** "Oooh babe!"
42** "My balls."[[labelnote:Explanation]]During "Mother", Roger Waters sings, "Mother, are they gonna break... my balls?" The gap between "break" and "my" makes the back half of that line very exploitable.[[/labelnote]]
43* MisaimedFandom:
44** Although the last quarter of The Wall was an attack on neo-Nazis, regrettably some individuals failed to grasp this, as [[http://www.adl.org/Learn/Ext_US/Hammerskin.asp the ADL's page concerning the Hammerskin Nation]] makes abundantly clear.[[note]]It doesn't help that Alan Parker used real-life Neo Nazi skinheads in the film.[[/note]]
45** When Roger Waters took his solo Wall tour to Europe in 2013, concertgoers misinterpreted Waters' use of the Star Of David (along with other logos and symbols such as the Christian cross, [=McDonald=]'s logo, hammer and sickle, Shell Oil logo and the Mercedes logo being dropped like bombs from airplanes) during the "Goodbye Blue Sky" visual, along with a Star Of David printed on the inflatable pig which is destroyed, and the Hammers/Nazis scenes, as being Anti-Semite and Pro-Nazi. [[https://www.facebook.com/notes/roger-waters-the-wall/an-open-letter-from-roger-waters/688037331210720 Waters denied this]], stating he was protesting it as a "symbol of the state" rather than the Jewish religion, and that his issue was with Israel conducing what he saw as a state of Apartheid within its borders since 1967.
46** To a lesser extent, grungy teenagers who use the album's songs as an actual rallying cry for their own social isolation are kind of not getting the message.
47** When it comes to individual songs from the album, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" has been a particular target.
48*** "We don't need no education." has several meanings, to believe it is a song against learning or education is to miss the subtlety. In fact, the sentence is a double negative, which literally means "We need education", suggesting that yes, education can be a good thing in developing well-rounded individuals. The song is a protest, however, against cruel teachers and systems who mold the school children into mindless drones of society. It is saying "We don't need '''this type''' of education." It's a criticism against the types of teachers and systems that, as in Pink's case, ridicule an imaginative child for writing poetry, and are aimed mainly at crushing students' individuality to mould them into an "acceptable" shape.
49*** [[WordOfGod Roger Waters]] explains that the song isn't anti-education, but against the kind of strict, demoralizing, condescending, conformist schooling like Waters suffered through, which discourages free thought and expression in attempts to keep its students in line and keep them subservient. This was more evident in the demo, where the original lyric was "We don't need ''your'' education".
50---->'''[[http://www.angelfire.com/ok2/wall/interview.html Waters]]''': "Obviously not all teachers are what we have to fear. The school I was at -- they were really like that. They were so fucked up that what they had to offer was their own bitterness and cynicism. Some of them, I may say, were very nice guys and understood what was going on."
51** "Young Lust" gets airplay on classic rock stations and is also likely taken at face value divorced from the context of the album, despite being a parody of ArenaRock.
52* MoralEventHorizon: Pink, when he forms an actual white supremacist movement. (This is if we take his perspective at face value.)
53* NightmareFuel: [[NightmareFuel/TheWall Has its own page.]]
54* OneSceneWonder: Creator/TimCurry as the Prosecutor in the ''Live in Berlin'' version of "The Trial". The Judge in general is this, especially in the movie, where the main thing most audiences remember afterwards is the giant, singing ass.
55* QuestionableCasting: Toni Tennille, best known as the vocalist for then-husband-and-wife soft rock duo Music/CaptainAndTennille, sang backup vocals for the songs in Fascist Pink's persona. Tennille even attended one of the live shows and a Pink Floyd fan recognized her but didn't believe she sang on the album until he checked the album credits, as his friend had brought a copy of the album to the show.
56* RetroactiveRecognition: A teacher is played by Creator/BrendaCowling, who would later be best known for playing Mrs. Lipton in ''Series/YouRangMLord''. Pink's Manager is played by Creator/BobHoskins, who already had a respectable acting career but wasn't yet the household name that Film/WhoFramedRogerRabbit and {{Film/Hook}} helped him become.
57* SignatureSong: "Comfortably Numb", "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2", and "The Trial" are collectively the most famous songs on the album. Doubles as SignatureScene due to the film sequences associated with them also being highly iconic, particularly "The Trial".
58* SpecialEffectFailure: In a movie filled with horrific and visceral imagery, the "meat" coming out of the grinder the kids fall into in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" is remarkably unconvincing.
59* {{Squick}}: Those dang genital flowers in "What Shall We Do Now?" (though they ''are'' beautifully animated!)
60* TearJerker: [[TearJerker/TheWall Has its own page.]]
61* ValuesResonance:
62** The themes of social isolation and mental decay have taken on a new resonance during the COVID-19 lockdowns and [[GoMadFromTheIsolation subsequent psychological problems]] that many people suffered, as well as the resurgence of the far right in the '10s. The album's themes also resonate with the greater focus on mental health in the 21st century, to say nothing of its implicit condemnation of the mindless worship of celebrities.
63** On a musical level, the lyrics of "One of My Turns" could easily pass for the lyrics of an {{emo}} song, even though it was written around three decades before the genre existed--making it seem rather ahead of its time in hindsight.
64* SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome:
65** Both the original Pink Floyd version as well as Roger Waters' revival featured impressive stage shows.
66** Firstly, the wall was actually constructed across the entirety of the stage. Large brick-sized windows allowed the audience to see the band within, until the set got to "Another Brick in the Wall, pt. 3", when these would be closed off, and the open center portion began to be filled in. Waters would sing "Goodbye Cruel World" from the final brickhole, which would be closed by a stagehand at the moment the song finished. Additional notches in the wall would be revealed for the second half, including the trashed hotel room that Pink was staying in. Gilmour's solo in "Comfortably Numb" was performed on top of the wall, while the wall itself was tumbled from top to bottom by stagehands at the end of "The Trial".
67** Large puppets of the Schoolmaster, the Mother and the Wife appeared throughout the first half. Pink himself appeared as a tiny puppet atop the wall for "Stop".
68** A circular screen above and behind the band showed the animations provided by Scarfe; other projections would appear on the bricks of the wall, most notably during "Waiting for the Worms" and "The Trial", which played the same sequence from the film. For the 1990 performance on the "no man's land" section of the UsefulNotes/BerlinWall outside Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, the call to "TEAR DOWN THE WALL" at the end of "The Trial" switched the animated footage to [[TearJerker superimpose the actual graffiti from sections of the real Berlin Wall]] onto the fake one, before it was toppled over.
69** "In the Flesh?", as well as the Fascist Pink concert near the end of the album, were actually performed by a fake Pink Floyd band in front of the wall, complete with their own bombastic light show.
70** For the 1990 performance, all of the guest performers appeared in front of the wall in their own eccentric costumes, with Thomas Dolby as the Schoolmaster taking the cake: he was strapped to the wall in an enormous version of the costume, with the limbs containing large bungee straps for him to bounce around on.
71** For ''The Wall Live'', Waters' 2010-13 tour, the puppets were updated, new animations were produced, and a drone-controlled inflatable pig were added.
72* TheWoobie:
73** Pink really needs a hug. Of course, as his descent into madness and fascism progresses, he slides from a standard woobie into a JerkassWoobie and, [[UnreliableNarrator if he actually did manage to raise a small army of fascists and terrorize the countryside]], a WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds.
74** The teacher is also a JerkassWoobie, as several songs on ''The Final Cut'' show him to be a ShellShockedVeteran. Not to mention the abuse he suffers from his wife.
75** Pink's wife. All she wanted was a normal relationship with her husband.
76** Rounding it all out, we have Pink's mother; lost her husband and clung to her son (who was all she had left) only for [[MyBelovedSmother her protectiveness]] to [[NiceJobBreakingItHero cause MORE problems than it solved]].

Top