Music / The Wall

–we came in?

Is there anybody out there...?

So ya' thought ya' might like to go to the show
To feel the warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow
Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes,
You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise!

— "In the Flesh?"

The Wall is the eleventh studio album by Pink Floyd, released on 30 November 1979 through Harvest Records in the UK and Columbia Records in the US. It is their last studio album to feature Pink Floyd as a quartet: keyboardist Richard Wright was fired during the making of this album, and while he officially returned by The Division Bell, bassist and de-facto bandleader Roger Waters had left as well in the interim. The theme of this album is similar to the one found in the band's earlier work The Dark Side of the Moon as it involved descent into insanity. The album also marked the start of the band's working relationship with Bob Ezrin, previously known for his work with artists such as Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, KISS, and Peter Gabriel; Ezrin would bring his bombastic sound to this album, building off of the punk-inspired Arena Rock sound that Pink Floyd had already developed on Animals.

The Wall tells the story of Pink, a fictional rock star struggling with deep-set childhood trauma and the deliberate self-destruction and self-isolation he escapes into. As his marriage falls apart and his drug abuse escalates, he distances himself further and further from reality and human connection. The character of "Pink" is based on both Roger Waters and Syd Barrett.

Waters came up with the idea for the album after the last concert of the 1977 In the Flesh tour for the band's album Animals. During the concert, an unruly fan climbed the fence between the crowd and the band. In reaction, Waters spat in his face - And the fan was *overjoyed* to be spat on. This event caused Waters to realise that he was starting to distance himself from others and becoming an increasingly cold and destructive person. He even jokingly suggested that the band build a wall between themselves and the fans.

The album and movie share the same story, albeit with a few minor differences, and told in an abstract way. The first half of the movie and album introduce us to Pink and his traumatic childhood. Events and circumstances in his childhood life—an overbearing/overprotective mum, a father who died in World War II, and abusive teachers—cause him to shun human interaction because he's afraid he'll be hurt, every incident that causes him pain serving as just another brick in the "wall" that he is constructing between himself and the outside world. As an adult, Pink fills the "empty spaces" of his wall with Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll.

With us so far? Right.

After Pink finds out that his wife cheated on him, he trashes his hotel room and scares away a groupie before he finally snaps and completes his wall, shutting himself out entirely, and the album and movie take us inside the mind of Pink for the second half. After being revived from a drug coma and forcefully shot up with even more drugs by his managers to get him on-stage, he imagines that he has become the very same force that started his wall—Fascists (okay, "hammer army")—and begins to order the audience to hate on various minority groups. Eventually, he retreats further into his mind during a moment of brief clarity. Wondering if he's "been guilty all this time," Pink puts himself on trial with a literal giant arse as judge and warped visions of his childhood fears as jury, and forces himself to tear down his wall as a result.

The very personal, intensely emotional themes of one man's inability to connect with the rest of the world are deeply intertwined with the Real Life social and political circumstances of the Cold War. The pointlessness of war and nationalism, Generational Trauma, institutionalized child abuse in the form of corporal punishment in schools^note which at least some members of Pink Floyd must have experienced, as it was legal in British state-supported schools until 1986, the resurgence of fascism in Europe^note The undoubtedly fascist British National Party was founded in 1982, the same year the movie came out, the music industry and the relationship between art and commerce, addiction and mental illness are all key themes of the story - "The Wall" is the story of one individual isolating himself over his own unprocessed trauma, and it is the story of a world gearing up for World War III when the deep scars of World War II have barely healed; a world where literal Walls had been built to manifest national interests and imprison populations.As documentarian and film critic Dan Olson summarizes The Wall: "Core to the theme of the piece as a whole, no one specific thing is the load-bearing cause. There is no singular source of the sickness in society that isolates us from one another, that suppresses us, that brutalizes us, that exploits us. They are all just bricks in the wall."

The album was a major commercial success for Pink Floyd. It topped the album charts in ten countries; the lead single "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" would also reach number 1 in the UK, the US, and Norway. It would go on to be certified double-diamond in Canada, diamond in France, platinum *23-fold* in the US, platinum 14-fold in New Zealand, platinum 11-fold in Austria, quadruple-platinum in Italy and Germany, double-platinum in the UK, and platinum in Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and Spain. To this day, it remains the second-highest-selling album in the band's entire discography, bested only by The Dark Side of the Moon, and ranks among the biggest-selling albums in music history. As of 2018, it is also the highest-selling double-album of all time, with 30 million copies sold worldwide.

The band's tour promoting the album featured giant puppets, Deranged Animation by political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe and most notably, a giant wall of cardboard bricks that was constructed between the musicians and the audience during the course of the first half of the show; a live album of their two performances at Earl's Court, titled Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81, was released in 2000. While the stage show did manage to attract a quite sizable audience, it was so expensive and cost so much to put together that the tour only had 31 shows in four different cities (London, New York, Dortmund and Los Angeles); a revival tour by Roger Waters in 2010/2011 is still the most expensive concert tour of all time. A special one-off performance was staged in Berlin in 1990, on the no man's land space between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Wall was supported by three singles: "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", "Run Like Hell", and "Comfortably Numb". The film adaptation, meanwhile, was supported by one single: "When the Tigers Broke Free", later added to The Final Cut in 2004.

Preceded by Animals. Proceeded by The Final Cut.

Note that this page discusses both the album and the film based on it.

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Tracklist:

Disc One

Side One

1. "In The Flesh?" (3:16)
2. "The Thin Ice" (2:27)
3. "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)" (3:21)
4. "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" (1:46)
5. "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" (3:59)
6. "Mother" (5:32)

Side Two

1. "Goodbye Blue Sky" (2:45)
2. "Empty Spaces" (2:10) ^note Originally planned to include "What Shall We Do Now?", but was cut out at the last minute due to the space restraints of the LP format. It ended up appearing in the film and live album, though; in the film, it replaces "Empty Spaces", while on the live album, it's a pair of Siamese Twin Songs, with "Empty Spaces" occupying the first half, and "What Shall We Do Now?" being the second half cut from the studio album.
3. "Young Lust" (3:25)
4. "One of My Turns" (3:41)
5. "Don't Leave Me Now" (4:08)
6. "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)" (1:48)
7. "Goodbye Cruel World" (0:48)

Disc Two

Side Three

1. "Hey You" (4:40) ^note A scene for this song was filmed for Pink Floyd – The Wall, but it was cut out both to conserve running time and because it was thought to be too repetitive (as 80% of its footage already appeared during montage sequences elsewhere in the film)
2. "Is There Anybody Out There?" (2:44)
3. "Nobody Home" (3:26)
4. "Vera" (1:35)
5. "Bring the Boys Back Home" (1:21)
6. "Comfortably Numb" (6:23)

Side Four

1. "The Show Must Go On" (1:36) ^note Excluded from Pink Floyd – The Wall
2. "In the Flesh" (4:15)
3. "Run Like Hell" (4:20)
4. "Waiting for the Worms" (4:04)
5. "Stop" (0:30)
6. "The Trial" (5:13)
7. "Outside the Wall" (1:41)

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Principal Members:

• David Gilmour – guitar, backing and lead vocals, bass, synthesizer, clavinet, rototom, cymbal, mandolin
• Nick Mason – drums, percussion, bass drum, cymbal, guitar
• Roger Waters – lead vocals, bass, guitar, VCS3, synthesizer, clarinet
• Richard Wright – keyboard, synthesizer, vocals, organ, piano, clavinet, bass pedals, accordion

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Hey you, don't tell me there's no tropes at all!

#-C

• Adaptational Heroism: The film version of Pink is depicted as only being emotionally distant from his wife, rather than actively cheating on her and abusing her, which makes him more sympathetic when he gets cheated on.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: Played horrifically straight in the movie during the animated sequence for "Empty Spaces/What Shall We Do Now?" In the sequence, a wall of personal possessions (cars, stereos, TVs, etc.) turns into a wall of buildings, which turns into the titular white brick wall. The Wall moves across the land at frightening speed, turning flowers into barbed wire, and babies into skinhead goons. It even plows its way through a church, transforming it into a neon-lit casino that spews neon bricks.
• Album Closure: The final song is "Outside the Wall," a brief track that, while still leaving Pink's fate ambiguous, wraps up the album with a message about how it's not all that great to isolate yourself.^note along with "Isn't this where—" which leads into the intro track
• Album Title Drop: The wall is mentioned with that exact wording in all three parts of "Another Brick in the Wall", "Mother", "Empty Spaces"/"What Shall We Do Now?", "Hey You", "In the Flesh", "The Trial", and "Outside the Wall". There is also a mention of the wall without using the wording "the wall" in "Waiting for the Worms".
  All in all you're just another brick in THE WALL.
• All Part of the Show: At the first live performance, part of the set caught fire from the pyrotechnics. The audience cheered, thinking it was yet another one of the band's special effects, before the fire department arrived. Fortunately, the fire was put out and the show continued without incident.
• Alone Among Families: In the movie, young Pink goes to a playground and sees the other children with their fathers. He tries to get the attention of one father, but is brushed off.
• Alternate Album Cover: CD releases of the 2011 remaster (both the Discovery and Pink Floyd Records editions) change the text on the front cover from black to red.
• Ambiguous Ending: "Outside the Wall" leaves Pink's fate open to interpretation. While he's had a major epiphany about how his self-isolation has been destroying his life and hurting everybody around him, what he's going to do after this point is up to personal interpretation, with the reprise of the intro to "In the Flesh?" leaving open the possibility that he might just spiral back into his old ways if he isn't careful.
• Anaphora:
  • In "Goodbye Blue Sky", the verses begin almost every line with the words "did-did-did-did you," tying in with how the lyrics reminisce on the scars of World War II, which Pink's father died fighting in.
  • Almost every line in "Mother" begins with either "mother" (in Pink's verses) or "mama" (in the titular mother's choruses). Usually they form part of the larger phrases "mother, do you think" or "mama's gonna."
  • In "Hey You", almost every set of lines in the verses begins with a Title Drop.
  • "Waiting for the Worms" begins each line of the hook with the word "waiting," tying in with its nature as a List Song about all the things Pink wants to see happen while envisioning himself as a neofascist dictator.
    (Waiting) To cut out the deadwood
    (Waiting) To clean up the city
    (Waiting) To follow the worms
    (Waiting) To put on a black shirt
    (Waiting) To weed out the weaklings
    (Waiting) To smash in their windows and kick in their doors
    (Waiting) For the final solution to strengthen the strain
    (Waiting) To follow the worms
    (Waiting) To turn on the showers and fire the ovens
    (Waiting) For the queers and the coons and the reds and the Jews
    (Waiting) To follow the worms
• And I Must Scream: The Wall emphasizes how Pink is essentially inflicting this trope upon himself, using the Wall as a means to distance himself from reality and human interaction, completely relinquishing control of his life and circumstances after everything he's gone through.
• Animal Motifs:
  • The worms. Starting in "Hey You", they are, according to Waters, "symbols of negative forces within ourselves, [of] decay. The worms can only get at us because there isn't any light or whatever in our lives". The judge is a worm named Worm before he turns into a buttocks.
  • Pink's wife is often associated with predatory insects, especially ones that eat their mates when they're done mating with them (i.e. mantises and scorpions).
  • The "Goodbye Blue Sky" animation features a dove morphing into a predatory eagle (specifically the kind prevalent in some Nazi iconography) morphing into a bomber plane.
  • Possibly unintentional, but the Prosecutor in "The Trial" looks a fair bit like a vulture, especially when he leaps onto the wall, perches on it and briefly stretches out his neck while holding out his arms like wings. This fits with how lawyers are frequently perceived as deceitful opportunists.
• Answer Cut: "Empty Spaces" sees Pink ask himself how to continue to fill the gaps in his ever-growing wall; the song hard-cuts into "Young Lust", implying that as an adult, his main way of closing those holes is through casual sex.
• Anti-Love Song: "Don't Leave Me Now".
  Remember the flowers I sent?
  I need you, babe
  To put through the shredder in front of my friends
  Ooh, babe, don't leave me now
  How could you go?
  When you know how I need you to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night
• Appliance Defenestration: One of Pink's televisions suffers this fate during his rampage through his hotel room in "One of My Turns", highlighted on the album version by the sounds of breaking glass and the highway outside. The film version makes it explicit that it's the TV that got chucked out.
• Arc Words: Of course, the words 'bricks' and 'wall' are repeated through songs as Pink isolates himself more and more. The motif of 'oh babe' is also repeated, most famously in 'Mother', 'Nobody Home' and 'Don't Leave Me Now', symbolising not only Pink's mother and relationship issues, but also his desperate call and desire for physical and emotional affection.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Pink starts advocating violence against the following that he finds in the audience: Jews, homosexuals, black people, stoners, and ... people with pimples on their faces.
• Assimilation Academy: "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)"
• Audible Gleam: Appears in "Comfortably Numb", right after the line "Okay, it's just a little pinprick."
• Audience Participation Song:
  • Invoked in live performances during the "Pink's concert turns into a fascist rally" portion, to go with Roger Waters' opinion of concerts as mass hysteria. One early idea was to have Pink literally bomb his audience, who'd still cheer as they were ripped apart.
    Roger Waters: Are there any paranoids in the audience tonight? Is there anybody who worries about things? Pathetic! This is for all the WEAK people in the audience! Is there anyone here who's WEAK? (Audience cheers) This is for you, it's called 'Run Like Hell'!^note Sometimes Waters would introduce the song under the title "Run Like Fuck" Let's all have a CLAP! COME ON, I CAN'T HEAR YOU! PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER! HAVE A GOOD TIME! ENJOY YOURSELVES!!! THAT'S BETTER! AAAAAARGH!
  • And in case you miss the point, the intro to "Waiting For The Worms" immediately afterwards...
    Sound FX: (Marching boots)
    Roger Waters: ARE YOU WITH US??
    Audience: YEEEEEEAH!
    Roger Waters: EINS, ZWEI, DREI, ALLE!
  • "Mother should I trust the government?" Live audiences invariably answer with a resounding "NO!"
• Author Appeal: The movie shows more of Waters' left-wing politics. Pink's wife meets the man she has an affair with at a CND rally, for example.
• Author Avatar: Pink is primarily based on Roger Waters, with elements of Syd Barrett and Gerald Scarfe tossed in as well.
• Auto Erotica: During "Run Like Hell", Pink warns that even lovers in cars are not safe from the wrath of the Hammers, and in the part of the movie that features the song, an interracial couple engaging in this trope are set upon by the Hammers in question, with the man being dragged out of the car and beaten up and the woman being raped.
• Balcony Speech: Pink gives one in his Nazi uniform early on, serving as a metaphor about the band's relationship with their fans who saw them as godlike beings above and separated from them. At least one commentator has compared the scene to how gods are portrayed in theatre, where they sit and watch, observant of yet detached from humanity.
• Bald of Evil: When Pink transforms into his Fascist Pink persona, he shaves off all of his hair, including his eyebrows.
• Bath Suicide: The image of Pink bleeding out in his swimming pool.
• Beneath the Mask: "In the Flesh?"
  If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes, you'll just have to claw your way through this disguise.
• Best Years of Your Life: Cruelly subverted in "The Happiest Days of Our Lives," thanks to him having more than one Sadist Teacher during his school life.
  When we grew up an went to school there were certain teachers
  Who would hurt the children any way they could.
  By pouring their derision upon anything we did
  Exposing every weakness, no matter how carefully hidden by the kids.
• Big Brother Is Watching: On Waters' 2012 The Wall tour, "Mother" features visuals such as a surveillance camera and the message "Big Brother Is Watching", with the BR in "Brother" crossed out and an M painted over it to say "Big Mother Is Watching".
• Big Word Shout: Just after the chanting of the word "Hammer" drowns out Pink's megaphone amplified voice in "Waiting For The Worms" he yells out the word Stop! signalling the beginning of the song of the same name.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: At the end of the song "In the Flesh?" we hear an aeroplane coming down for a bombing dive, implying on the album (and showing in the movie) the death of Pink's father, and just right after, the sound of Pink crying, announcing his birth to the world at the beginning of "The Thin Ice".
• Bishōnen Line: The Wife in the Trial starts off as being visualized as a normal snake before becoming briefly a cobra mid-change before solidifying in the second form, a frilled-winged serpent with a vaguely distorted humanoid face, transfiguring into a monstrous insect hybrid with a more monstrous humanoid head, mantis arms as legs and a scorpion tail before ending as a naked woman with fire for hair though still being monstrous due to her proportions leaving her with an exaggerated arch back that leaves her bent behind with elongated arms and the bulbous heart shaped head.
• Bittersweet Ending: Pink gets rid of the mental wall he put up that was utterly destroying him after he puts himself on trial, but that doesn't change what happened for the rest of the album. He's still suffering from issues about his past, his wife left him, he destroyed a hotel room, and (if we take his word at face value) he started a Neo-Nazi revolution in Britain. It doesn't help that "Outside The Wall" doesn't explain what happened to Pink after the wall came down, and the very last lines suggest that his descent into isolation and madness might happen again. In the film, a group of children can be seen picking up bricks in the street and running off with them, suggesting that they're starting to build their own walls.
• Black Comedy: Several of the lyrics show an understated, deadpan sense of humour that either provides momentary relief from or reinforces the album's depressing atmosphere, such as: "Mother do you think they'll try to break my balls?" from "Mother"; Pink gleefully recounting how the abusive teachers are thrashed "within inches of their lives" every night by their "fat and psychopathic wives" in "The Happiest Days of Our Lives"; Pink's pathetic list of possessions in "Nobody Home"; the "little pinprick" (complete with sparkly sound effect) in "Comfortably Numb"; Pink psychotically ranting about shooting his fans in "In the Flesh"; and nearly all of "The Trial" for its over-operatic nature.
• Black Shirt: One of the many aspects of fascist imagery used in "Waiting For The Worms."
  Waiting to put on a black shirt!
  Waiting to weed out the weaklings!
  Waiting to smash in their windows and kick in their doors!
• Black Widow: Pink imagines his wife as a praying mantis/dragon hybrid with flaming hair. Some fans have also noted her resemblance to Rokurokubi from Japanese mythology.
• Blatant Lies: From the newer live tours of the album, we have what seems to be the Hammers' slogan: "Everything will be okay—you can trust us."
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: A non-lethal example: in the film, Pink spends part of his depressive episode in his hotel room floating in the outdoor pool, which becomes enveloped in a cloud of blood from the gash in his palm (which he got after clutching onto a window frame covered in broken glass).
• Boarding School of Horrors: "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" details Pink's formative years under the instruction of draconian, sadistic teachers who direct their personal hardships onto the students through both physical and verbal abuse.
• Body Horror: In the movie, Pink begins hallucinating that his body is rotting after being injected with drugs in the "Comfortably Numb" sequence. This also marks his transformation into Fascist Pink.
• Bookends:
  • The first song starts with quiet music and someone saying "—we came in?", the last song ends with the same quiet music and someone saying "Isn't this where—".
  • The second side of the first album starts with "Goodbye Blue Sky" and ends with "Goodbye Cruel World".
  • A near case of this can be found in the third quarter of the album. It was originally supposed to start with "Is There Anybody Out There?", but this was moved to the second song because "Hey You" made more musical sense at the beginning. However "Bring The Boys Back Home" still ends with Pink asking "Is there anybody out there?"
• Breather Episode: "Young Lust" takes a temporary detour from the story of Pink's fucked up personality, and "Is There Anybody Out There?" is a mainly instrumental, melancholy piece that musically depicts Pink's isolation after he's completed his wall.
• British Rock Star: Pink, who is an amalgam of Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, and later ends up adopting a fascist alter ego reminiscent of David Bowie's Thin White Duke persona (right down to the slicked-back hair in the film).
• BSoD Song: "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)" where Pink completely loses it after his wife leaves him is a pretty angry example of this, while "Stop!" is more of a guilt ridden example of such.
• Caged Bird Metaphor: From "Mother":
  Mama's gonna keep baby right here under her wing
  She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing^note Interestingly, he does literally become a singer, though it's implied he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and become a pilot.
• Canon Discontinuity: "Empty Spaces", a song that was written to replace "What Shall We Do Now?" due to space constraints on vinyl, was only heard on the album. "What Shall We Do Now?" was played live and included in the movie and "Empty Spaces" dropped, so it's safe to consider the former "canon."
• Careful with That Axe: A distinctive, sudden, high-pitched shriek similar to a tire squeal appears during the transition between "The Happiest Days Of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", as well as after the keyboard solo in "Run Like Hell". In both cases, the scream is directly lifted from the Trope Namer, "Careful With That Axe, Eugene".
• Celebrity Is Overrated: The overall theme of the album.
• Central Theme:
  • The most obvious one is isolation and self-destruction, with the album as a whole exploring in extensive detail the sorts of things that might cause a person to shut themself off from the world. The closing track is a heartfelt plea from Roger Waters directly to the audience to be open and honest with the people who care about you.
  • Dehumanization, whether from war, authoritarian schooling, overbearing parents, or simply being an incredibly famous person surrounded by people who either idolize you or just see you as a source of profit. Over the course of the album, Pink stops seeing himself as a human being with needs and emotions, which in turn causes him to start dehumanizing others.
  • The album keeps repeating Pink's desire to just go home.
• The Chain of Harm: The teacher, being a Henpecked Husband, takes out his frustration on his pupils. Made all the more literal in the movie version of "The Trial", where when the teacher is shown whipping Pink, while his wife is shown whipping him.
• Charge-into-Combat Cut: We see the charging soldiers at the Battle of Anzio cut back and forth with a years later young Pink, whose father died in the battle.
• Composite Character: Pink is based on Roger Waters and Syd Barrett. There's also a good amount of illustrator/animator Gerald Scarfe in there, too, particularly on "Another Brick in the Wall", "Goodbye Blue Sky", and "Comfortably Numb".
• Cigarette of Anxiety: The Troubled Production of the film drove Alan Parker to chain-smoking for the first time in his life.
• Concept Album: One of the most famous and influential examples in all of music. While most Pink Floyd albums revolve around central musical and lyrical themes, The Wall was their only fully fledged Rock Opera, and to this day is one of the most extravagent examples of the genre.
• Contemplating Your Hands: Appears in "Comfortably Numb" when Pink is on drugs.
  My hands felt just like two balloons.
  Now I've got that feeling once again
• The Cover Changes the Gender: Averted when Sinead O'Connor left the lyrics to "Mother" intact during Roger Waters's 1990 The Wall concert in Berlin.
• The Cover Changes the Meaning: Scissor Sisters' controversial disco version of "Comfortably Numb" changes the perspective from a man who can't get numb enough to a man who's enthralled to be numb beyond repair.
• A Crack in the Ice: "The Thin Ice":
  Don't be surprised if a crack in the ice
  Appears under your feet
• Creator Breakdown: In-Universe, Pink has an epic one during "Another Brick In The Wall, Part III" after his wife leaves him followed by another one after "Comfortably Numb", where his journey of self-revelation is interrupted with drugs, and finally his Heel Realization during "Stop" coincides with one.
• Creator Cameo: Roger Waters appears as one of the witnesses during the wedding scene in the film version of "Mother".
• Creepy Children Singing: Heard on "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", "Outside the Wall" and featured in the "Craaazy" refrain from "The Trial."
• Creepy Circus Music: "The Trial" opens with an orchestrated dark cabaret jaunt that continues until the judge shows up, to show just how twisted Pink's own psyche has become and how strange and creepy the trial itself is.
• Crowd Song: "Bring The Boys Back Home".
• Crucified Hero Shot: In the film, after the scene for "One of My Turns" and going directly into "Don't Leave Me Now", Pink is in a pool stretched out like this with one of his hands bleeding.

D-H

• Dad's Off Fighting in the War: Pink's earliest years were spent without a father due to him fighting in World War II. Pink's father would be killed in action and would not return home, leaving Pink with an overbearing mother and the first brick in his wall.
• Darker and Edgier: The Wall is arguably Pink Floyd's overall darkest album (depending on how you score Animals and The Final Cut), with a pervasive feeling of cynicism and despair permeating throughout both the lyrics and the music itself.
• Dark Reprise:
  • "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)" receives two Dark Reprises in the forms of Parts 2 and 3; whereas Part 1 is merely sad, Part 2 is angry; Part 3 marks the point where Pink snaps and enters Heroic BSoD.
  • The second "In the Flesh" is darker than the first (titled "In the Flesh?"), in that Pink has gone fascist (or is hiding behind a fascist persona, as hinted by the singer) and is now ready to wage war against the world that made him that way. Also, in the first one, after the line, "So you thought you might like to go to the show," there is the sound of someone singing, "Do do do do." The second version replaces the vocal with an instrumental part, suggesting a lack of humanity.
  • The use of sound effects in "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)" is quite notable to show just how far-gone Pink is. He takes out the remainder of his pent-up rage and frustration on the TV, and the crashing noises get louder and more intense.
    [television mumbling inaudibly]
    Pink: aaaaAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
    [crash] [crash] [crash] [crash] [crash] [crash]
    [beat]
    [mumbling resumes] [CRASH]
• Demoted to Extra: Roger Waters fired Richard Wright during the recording of the album, but Wright still played on the subsequent concerts. Ironically, since the tour was a financial flop, this meant the salaried Wright was the only member of the band to not lose money on it.
• Deranged Animation: Gerald Scarfe's animated sequences are equal parts grotesque and surreal, fitting the visceral nature of his concert animations for prior Floyd shows. And this is the same artist who would go on to design the characters for Disney's Hercules...
• Despair Event Horizon: The first half of the album ends with Pink crossing it, with "Goodbye Cruel World", right after his Heroic BSoD in "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)" where he declares why he wants to go behind the wall. The rest of the album is about what happens while he's beyond the horizon.
• Desperate Plea for Home: Pink suddenly regains lucidity right in the middle of his plunge into Neo-Nazism and realizes he's got serious problems. He plaintively expresses a desire to just go home, "take off this uniform and leave the show", but quickly realizes that he's in too deep — eventually segueing into "The Trial."
• Destination Defenestration: In "One of My Turns", Pink "offers" to do this to the groupie, then himself, causing the groupie to run in terror.
• Destructive Romance: "Don't Leave Me Now" sees Pink reflect on his collapsing marriage by portraying it as this, with him as the destructive party. Pink notes how he would "put [his wife] through the shredder in front of [his] friends" and "beat [her] to a pulp on a Saturday night," though the film adaptation clarifies that he was simply exaggerating his faults out of anger and self-pity. In actuality, he was emotionally distant from his wife rather than aggressive. This contradiction is consolidated in "The Trial", where Pink envisions his now-ex-wife giving him a tremendous "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how much pain his lack of warmth and commitment caused.
• Digital Destruction: The original US CD release by Columbia Records notoriously contains a prominent click at the start of "Comfortably Numb" due to a mastering error. Subsequent remasters fix the mistake.
• Disappeared Dad: Pink's father was killed in World War II^*"When the Tigers Broke Free" specifies that it was the Battle of Anzio, when Pink was just a child, and, thus, is absent from his life.
• Disney Acid Sequence: the animation sequence the accompanies "[[Thr Villain Sucks Song The Trial]".
• Divided We Fall: Pink realises this after he seals himself off from the world, and yells the trope name word for word at the end of "Hey You".
  Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all! Together we stand, divided we fall!
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The charge of the audience into the concert hall at the beginning of "In the Flesh?" in the movie, at least to one annotator, seemed suggestive of procreative sperm trying to reach their way into the birth canal to unite with the egg cell.
  • The animation of the flowers reproducing with each other during "Empty Spaces" resembles two humans coupling. Often the shapes of the flowers turn into sex organs.
  • Pink's cheating wife, who takes the form of a giant praying mantis (known for killing their mates by biting off their heads) with a Vagina Dentata for a mouth.
• The Dog Bites Back: Pink's wife's segment in "The Trial". Her verbal beatdown of Pink is the most cheer-worthy moment of the song's first half, since Pink's teacher simply whines about his failure to properly "flay him into shape", and Pink's mother rehashes her smothering tendencies.
• Domestic Abuser: Pink, although some think the line was metaphorical.
  Pink: How could you go? / You know I need you / to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night.
  • He was certainly neglectful and emotionally abusive.
• Double Standard: By a character, not the producers. Pink seriously considers cheating on his wife before going briefly Ax-Crazy and scaring the groupie off instead, and it's at least suggested that he has done so (and gone through with it) many times in the past. But as soon as he even suspects his wife of cheating on him, his cheese slips off his cracker completely. The movie attempts to portray Pink as more sympathetic in this regard, by having him cheat on her after he finds out she cheated on him. However, the film states explicitly that Pink showed no sexual interest in his wife at all, pushing her away when she wanted sex.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Averted. The abuse the schoolmaster suffers at his wife's hands is shown to have some serious negative effects on him — and by extension, his students.
• Dramatic Choir Number: In "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", the second iteration of the verse and chorus is performed by a choir of children from Islington Green School, representing students rebelling against abusive teachers like the ones that torment Pink in the album's narrative. The choir was inserted by producer Bob Ezrin to extend what was originally an interlude into a potential single; Ezrin had them record their parts in secret to avoid drawing suspicion from their teachers.
• Dramatic Irony: Pink sings "I have seen the writing on the wall", in "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)", right before breaking off all contact with the world. A huge Analogy Backfire ensues since it does not occur to him that the writing on the wall involved the imminent destruction of the Babylonian kingdom and death of its king, who was defenceless against the onslaught. The analysis summarises the irony as Pink attempting to make himself look like the prophet Daniel, but instead casting himself as the doomed Belshazzar. Furthermore, his complete isolation actually leaves him defenseless against the worms and later transformation into Fascist Pink, more or less hastening the wall's destruction.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Neo-Nazis take Pink's transformation seriously and not as satire. Didn't help that actual skinheads were used for the film.
• Driven to Suicide: Depends on how one wants to read the line, "I want to go home / Take off this uniform and leave the show," in "Stop". Regardless, he decides not to do so, with the events that follow.
• Drone of Dread: The buzzing synthesizer drone in "Hey You" and "Is There Anybody Out There?", representing the worms.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Several in the film adaptation.
  • At the beginning of "Stop" in the film, Pink mutters the words "Do you remember me? How we used to be?" to himself. These are lines from the then-unreleased song "Incarceration of a Flower Child" that would later be interpolated by "Your Possible Pasts" on The Final Cut a year later. He also recites lines which would later appear in "5:11 AM (The Moment of Clarity)" from Waters' solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.
  • During "Outside the Wall", one can briefly hear a melody that appears in the song "Southampton Dock" from The Final Cut.
  • "When the Tigers Broke Free", the first Floyd song heard in the movie, was released as a single, with the intention of it appearing on The Final Cut, but that didn't happen. It was first officially released on the 2001 compilation album Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd before finally being included on reissues of The Final Cut from 2004 onward.
• The Eleven O'Clock Number: "Stop" is Pink's brief, reflective, sung soliloquy immediately preceding his climatic "trial". Not as prominent in the film, as it is sung quietly in a bathroom stall with added phase-shifting effects, but it appears at the same moment and performs the same function.
• Epic Rocking: Downplayed compared to past Floyd albums. Only "Comfortably Numb" (6:23) qualifies.
• Evil Laugh: David Gilmour lets out a very sinister chuckle in the middle of "Waiting for the Worms".
• Evil Teacher: Pink's old math teacher. Somewhat sympathetic in that his hatred of his students is part of the Vicious Cycle theme of the movie/album. In fact, Waters went on to write several songs on The Final Cut from the teacher's POV, blaming his treatment of his students on his own trauma stemming from—surprise, surprise—WWII. "When you're one of the few/To land on your feet/What do you do to make ends meet?/Teach!"
• Excrement Statement: From "The Trial"
  The Judge^note who is literally a giant singing ass: The way you made them suffer
  Your exquisite wife and mother
  Fills me wit the urge to DEFECATE!
  Trial observer: Go on judge, shit on him!
• Fading into the Next Song: Most tracks. The best known is "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" → "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", with the second place probably going to "Empty Spaces" → "Young Lust". The few tracks that don't do this are the ones at the beginning and end of the original LP sides, but some of them have symbolic value: the sudden silence at the end of "Goodbye Cruel World" represents Pink's completion of his isolation from the world, and the fade-out during the guitar solo of "Comfortably Numb" symbolises the continued war between the various parts of Pink's personality.
• Feathered Fiend: The massive fighter plane-like Reichsadler eagle that appears in the film's "Goodbye Blue Sky" animation.
• Final Solution:
  • As if to drive home the Nazi comparisons, "Waiting For The Worms" has Pink singing about waiting for "The Final Solution to strengthen the strain", which would involve "turning on the showers and firing the ovens", and singling out "the queers and the coons and the Reds and the Jews".
  • Not many realise that when Pink sings, "If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot", he's not talking about just the minorities. He means all of his fans.
• Forced to Watch: The 1980–81 tours involved the "Surrogate Band," four session musicians who wore life-masks of Pink Floyd's members during "In the Flesh?" and the "fascist rally" set. During those three songs, you realise that the "old" Pink Floyd is being forced to play at the "new" Pink Floyd's concert, and they're playing their instruments rather stiffly and unwillingly, as if they've got guns pointed at them.
• Framing Device: The album itself isn't clear on whether or not this is the case with the opening song, "In the Flesh?" but the movie seems to use the song as one, having Pink sing to the crowds before showing us his life up to that point looking just like he does after his descent into neo-Nazism.
• French Jerk: Subverted— Pink's Wife is sometimes given a French accent in her part of "The Trial" and is visually presented in a very unflattering light, but she's also one of the few who has a valid complaint against him, as opposed to just whining that she couldn't keep him under her control like his Teacher and Mother.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: While the first pieces of Pink's wall were the result of childhood trauma, the movie, album, and Waters himself make it very clear that it's his fault for maintaining his Wall instead of coming to terms with his world and that his unhappy marriage and cheating wife were implied to have been at least partially his fault.
• Fully Absorbed Finale: The titular song on The Final Cut features Pink discussing his mental issues in therapy, while the album has No Ending.
• Funny Background Event: In "The Trial", someone in the audience yells "Go judge, shit on him!"
• Gainax Ending: Pink puts himself through a hallucinatory "trial" where the most important people from his past life berate him for causing them so much pain, the monsters from within his mind condemn him for showing human emotions, and he has his mental wall torn down as a "final sentence". In the movie, we cut to a clip of a brick wall exploding, and see a strangely tranquil scene of children playing in some rubble and pouring out (what appears to be) a Molotov cocktail as "Outside the Wall" plays. Roll credits.
• Genre Roulette: Arena, acoustic, hard, and of course, progressive rock. With some shades of disco. Plus flirtations with bar-band balladry ("Nobody Home"), electronic (the first half of "Don't Leave Me Now"), and quasi-opera ("The Trial").
• Giant Flyer: In the "Goodbye Blue Sky" clip from the movie, a massive fighter plane-like eagle makes an appearance. In "What Shall We Do Now?", the girl flower turns into a large pterodactyl-like...thing.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Done in the film and concert versions of "In The Flesh", where Pink points out people who have qualities he doesn't like.
  That one looks Jewish! And that one's a coon!
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Pink experiences a self-inflicted version of this after constructing the wall around himself, discovering that alienating everyone and everything is much worse than having to deal with them like before.
  But it was only a fantasy / The wall was too high as you can see / No matter how he tried he could not break free / And the worms ate into his brain
• Godwin's Law: The album explicitly compares arena concerts to Nazi rallies.
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: Trope Namer, though Pink doesn't commit suicide. He does threaten to do it in "One Of My Turns" ("Would you like to learn to fly? / Would you like to see me try?"), and suggests he might still do it in "Stop" (I want to go home / Take off this uniform and leave the show")
• Gratuitous German: Waters can be heard calling out "Eins, zwei, drei, alle!" at the beginning of "Waiting For The Worms".
• Gratuitous Panning:
  • "Run Like Hell". Every new line Roger sings switches to the opposite channel. (This also occurs in the live version on Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81, except Roger and David are trading lines.)
    Left Channel: You better run all day and run all night
    Right Channel: and keep your dirty feelings deep inside!
  • "Run Like Hell" also begins with a crowd chanting "Pink! Floyd! Pink! Floyd!" solely in the left channel, which is pointed out by a commenter in the above-mentioned analysis as a symbolic reference to the band's own left-wing beliefs, Waters being a vocal socialist. The chant is also heard in the end, but another crowd yelling "HAMMER! HAMMER!" appears in the right channel and becomes loud enough to drown out the other crowd. Considering the song that is transitioned to is "Waiting For The Worms", the panning isn't a coincidence.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Pink is this after the unfortunate phone call home.
• Groin Attack: In the movie version of "The Trial", Pink's wife grabs his limp, rag-doll body and holds him by his...well, you get the idea. This is Foreshadowed in "Mother", where one of Pink's worries is precisely this.
  Pink: Mother do you think they'll try to break... my balls?
• Gun Stripping: In an early scene, Pink's father removes the bullets from his revolver and cleans the barrel.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: A heartbeat is used as percussion in "In the Flesh?"
• Heel Realization: "Stop". The album itself was a response to Roger's own heel realisation.
• He-Man Woman Hater: A rare example that has a halfway decent Freudian Excuse—Pink has let his experiences with his mother and his wife color his view on women on the whole, viewing them all as being either promiscuous liars and deceivers or oppressive, controlling matriarchs. This is best illustrated in "The Trial", wherein his wife is portrayed first as a giant man-eating bug and then as a hideous, Freudian temptress with handle bars on her waist, while his mother is a borderline literal Knight Templar Parent who tries to drag him back into her womb just to keep him safe.
• Henpecked Husband:
  • In "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", Pink gleefully recounts how "in the town it was well known, when [his teachers] got home at night, their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives." The film version accompanies this with a scene where one of said teachers is pressured into finishing his meal by his scowling wife, and in the animated sequence for "The Trial", a distorted version of him is shown being smacked around by her.
  • Subverted with Pink himself. His wife wants normal human interaction, but Pink ignores her desires.
• Here We Go Again!:
  • Pink's mental problems are cyclical. Every time he goes into one of his "turns" (and "One of My Turns" makes it quite clear this is a habitual occurrence), his friends have to deal with an unreasonable, abusive Pink. Some of them "stumble and fall" (i.e. his wife), but they still try to help.
  • The album itself takes the final 18 seconds of closing track "Outside the Wall" and places them at the very start of the album, splitting the sentence "Isn't this where we came in?" right down the center.
• Heroic BSoD: Especially "Comfortably Numb" and, well, the rest of the album.
• Hey, You!: A song is titled that way:
  Don't help them to bury the light
  Don't give in without a fight
• Hope Spot: A very unusual one. "One of My Turns" is probably the first genuine emotion he's allowed himself to feel in quite some time, and one can argue that it's the moment where he realizes that the wall is a problem.
• How We Got Here: The album opens with "In the Flesh?", where Pink is at full "dictator" mode, and decides to tell his story. It eventually returns to that moment with "In The Flesh", where shows Pink after his psychotic break turning his concert into a fascist neo-Nazi rally.

I-M

• I'm a Humanitarian: The line "How can ya have any PUDDIN' if ya don't eat yer Meat?" is given a darker context in the music video for and film version of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)", which depicts Pink imagining students being put through a giant meat grinder.
• In the Style of:
  • "Young Lust" is a pastiche of Arena Rock bands like Foreigner and Bad Company. There's also a little bit of Self-Deprecation here, too: in the 1979 interview with Tommy Vance, Roger said that it was inspired by the earlier Floyd tune "The Nile Song".
  • The male backing vocals throughout the album are meant to evoke The Beach Boys, right down to featuring Bruce Johnston as one of the backing singers.
  • The album version of "Outside the Wall" is meant to sound like it's being played by a kitschy troupe of street performers, to the point where its working title was "The Buskers". The film version, meanwhile, uses a more opulent brass-backed choir.
• The Invisible Band: The original tour had the backup musicians dressed as Pink Floyd (including the masks seen on the Is There Anybody Out There? cover) during both parts of The Wall.
• iProduct: Mercilessly mocked during the 2012 "The Wall" tour, where they flash people with pig heads and white headphone cords going to their ears doing various activities with phrases like iResist and iLose.
• It Will Never Catch On: In the movie, the teacher ridicules young Pink's lyrics to "Money", one of Pink Floyd's signature songs, as "absolute rubbish". A bit of Reality Subtext can be found here, as "Money" was one of Pink Floyd's most requested songs at concerts, to the point where it became one of the band's biggest points of contention with their fans. The success of Dark Side of the Moon had brought them a whole new audience who didn't know anything about their previous work.
• Irony: In the song, Another Brick in the Wall, the lyric sings about how they do not need an education while using terrible grammar.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: The second half of the album and movie takes place well inside a very disturbed mind with brief glimpses to the outside on "Comfortably Numb", and with the sound effects heard throughout that half.
• Judicial Wig: Pink's trial is presided over by Judge Arse in the film and theatrical versions. He is Exactly What It Says on the Tin—a giant talking human backside wearing a long white judge's wig. On the film version, the Judge first appears as a worm, which then turns into a wig.
• Kangaroo Court: "The Trial", where Pink puts himself on trial, with only one possible conclusion (the judge doesn't even need the jury's input). However it ultimately proves useful as the judge orders him to tear down the wall that had divided him from everyone else.
• Kayfabe Music: Invoked and Lampshaded "In the Flesh". Ironically, it's a Bookend to the song "In the Flesh?" where backup or guest musicians usually take the place of Pink Floyd wearing Pink Floyd masks.
• Kids Rock:
  • "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" is sung by a children's choir in its second half, a technique lifted from Alice Cooper's "School's Out" (another Bob Ezrin-produced song).
  • Roger Waters' son, Harry, delivers the line, "Look Mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky!" in "Goodbye Blue Sky".
  • A more eerie children's choir echoes the choruses in "The Trial".
• Large Ham: Bob Geldof's portrayal of Pink. Roger himself delivers some songs with extreme bombast (best example being "The Trial", where he delves into 5 different characters, each hammier than the previous).
• Laser-Guided Karma: The teachers in "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" that hurt the children receive their comeuppance every night when their wives beat them "within inches of their lives".
• Laughing Mad: In a dream sequence during the film, Pink, represented by his younger self, comes across a version of his adult self in this state. It freaks him the fuck out.
• Limey Goes to Hollywood: In-Universe, Pink himself—the movie makes it fairly clear that this part of the tour is in L.A.
• List Song: "What Shall We Do Now?" where Pink lists all the things he can do with his new-found fame and fortune, and "Nobody Home", where he lists all of his worldly possessions.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Pink, to his mother. Has terrible consequences for his marriage.
  • Everyone, to Pink. You know, the bleeding hearts and the artists.
• Lonely Piano Piece:
  • "Nobody Home", a piano-driven piece where Pink is forced to contemplate his self-imposed isolation.
  • And previously, a Lonely Guitar Piece with "Is There Anybody Out There?", where Pink is faced with the seemingly irreversible nature of the wall's completion.
• Looped Lyrics: "Is There Anybody Out There?" simply repeats its title four times, before going into its lonely guitar piece.
• Loss of Identity:
  • In the film version, whenever a group has masks on their faces, this is essentially what happened to them.
  • The life masks of each band member were used by the appropriate members of the touring group (e.g. guitarist Snowy White when subbing for David Gilmour) while on stage, up to the point that during during the very first song, and at other certain points of the performance, none of the actual Floyd members are on stage. The Wall was born partly from Waters's Artist Disillusionment and the realization that nobody actually knew or cared who the band members were, just that there was some spectacle on stage (though this certainly wasn't helped by the band's stage shows being almost entirely spectacle for a full decade, and their pictures rarely ever appearing in their album artwork.)
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Mother", "In the Flesh". "Run Like Hell" wins the prize, however—dance the night away to lyrics discussing racial violence and rape.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: In the movie, we see Pink's Hammer army attack a black man making out with a white woman in the back of his car, while one of their numbers rapes the woman.
• Madness Mantra:
  • "Is there anybody out there? "Is there anybody out there? "Is there anybody out there? "Is there anybody out there?"
  • "WRONG, do it again! WRONG, do it again! WRONG, do it again! WRONG, do it again ..."
• Mind Screw: The film is pretty surreal at moments.
• Minimalistic Cover Art: Just a featureless white brick wall, with the band name and title written on it in black graffiti (sometimes red, depending on the release); original LP pressings made the name and title a sticker that could be removed to leave the wall entirely blank. Still, don't judge an album by its outside cover; it's what's inside that counts.
• Miniscule Rocking: "Stop" clocks in at only 30 seconds, making it the shortest song in Pink Floyd's entire library, beating out "A New Machine, Pt. 2" from A Momentary Lapse of Reason by 8 seconds. Still, it's also one of the most important songs on the album as it signals when Pink has his Heel Realization.
• Movie Bonus Song: "When the Tigers Broke Free" Parts I and II. The concerts also had an instrumental jam titled "The Last Few Bricks", played as the band waited on the stage crew to finish the stage wall, before "Goodbye Cruel World" started.
• My Beloved Smother: Deconstructed, like a lot of tropes that appear in the story. Pink's mother lost her husband and so she's obviously more than a little overprotective of her son, as he's all she has left. But this overprotection only makes everything worse, contributing to a lot of Pink's problems and willingly blocking him out from the outside world in a misguided effort to keep him safe. "The Trial" implies either that she would be fully willing to strip him of his freedom and free will just to protect him or that Pink perceives her as being willing to do so ("Why'd he ever have to leave me? Worm, your honor, let me take him home!"). It's telling that in the film version of "The Trial", while the other two "witnesses" (Pink's teacher and Pink's wife) appear from either behind or within the wall, Pink's mother becomes the wall.
  "Of COURSE Momma's gonna help build your wall..."
  "Mother, did it need to be so...high?"
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Roger had this reaction to his spitting on a fan at the last concert of the In the Flesh tour, which helped to inspire this album.
  • Pink has one about his decision to go behind the wall, leading to him crying out for meaningful human contact in "Hey You".
  • Later on, Pink has a second moment like this at the end of "Waiting for the Worms", leading directly to his Heel Realization in "Stop!"
  • Alan Parker had this reaction after the extras (real skinheads, by the way) really got into the rape scene in "Run Like Hell". That didn't stop him from using the footage, though.
• Mythology Gag: A lot of references to songs and concepts from Floyd's career are scattered throughout the album...
  • The scream from "Run Like Hell" and the beginning of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" was used in "Pow R. Toc H." and "Careful with That Axe, Eugene".
    • Pink's "favorite axe" brings to mind "Careful with That Axe, Eugene" and "One of These Days", although "axe" is a traditional rock slang term for guitar.
  • Floyd's use of war as a subject matter goes back as early as "Corporal Clegg" from A Saucerful of Secrets in 1968, a man scarred from his experiences in World War II. Wonder if he was the one who brought the bad news about Pink's dad...
    • "Waiting for the Worms" also uses similar vocal techniques to "Corporal Clegg" (clear words, followed by words that sound like they're coming through a megaphone—literally in the case of the latter song), as well as sharing certain structural similarities (aggressive verses driven by heavy guitar riffs, followed by more melodic choruses employing vocal harmonies).
  • Roger Waters mentioned in an interview that the main riff for "Another Brick In The Wall" was based on the first half of the main riff from "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", which, coincidentally, contains the line "Witness the man who raves at the wall".
    • Similarly, he mentioned that the Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll parody "Young Lust" is partly pastiched from "The Nile Song".
  • "Hey you, won't you help me to carry the stone?". "The stone" was also mentioned in "Crying Song" (from More) and "Dogs" (from Animals).
  • The voice of the rambling Scotsman from "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" (from Ummagumma) was probably the inspiration for the teacher, as well as the equally exaggerated accents shown by the characters in "The Trial".
  • Pink deliriously whines "Remember the flowers I sent" in "Don't Leave Me Now". "What Shall We Do Now?" mentions "sending flowers by phone", emphasising Pink's obliviousness and social disconnection.
  • One of Pink's wife's complaints in "The Trial" is "You should have talked to me more often than you did, but no! You had to go your own way!". One of the lyrics of "If" (from Atom Heart Mother) is "And if I were a good man/I'd talk with you more often than I do", thus reinforcing the fact that Pink is not a good man. (The slight change in words adds to the effect, as "If" mentions "talking with you more often" but Pink's wife is furious that Pink doesn't "talk to her more often", making Pink look even more of a jerkass.)
    • She also sings "I hope they throw away the key", a reference to one of the more famous lines from "Brain Damage". ("You lock the door/And throw away the key/There's someone in my head/But it's not me".)
    • She also mocks him by asking "Broken up any homes lately?", "break up homes?" being one of the suggestions in "What Shall We Do Now?".
  • Sound effects from "Echoes", such as the piano "ping" and the whale calls, were used in "Hey You" and "Is There Anybody Out There?" respectively.
  • Waters' son Harry saying the line "Look mummy! There's an aeroplane up in the sky!" at the start of "Goodbye Blue Sky". Sometime after the release of The Dark Side of the Moon, the band incorporated an exploding spitfire plane into their stage show, as the climax of "On The Run". Harry also plays keyboards in the new touring band.
  • From the film: The "poems" that little Pink gets taken from him and read condescendingly to the class in school are from the lyrics to "Money".
  • Also from the film: The poems Bob Geldof mumbles in the "Stop" sequence include lyrics from "Your Possible Pasts", from The Final Cut, and "5:11 AM (The Moment Of Clarity)" from Waters' solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking (which, as detailed in the What Could Have Been section, was originally offered to the band as a possible concept along with The Wall).
  • The biggest one of all comes from Wish You Were Here (1975), and has connections in reality: the song "Have a Cigar" asks, "Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?" Which, naturally, came up in a radio interview.
    • Roy Harper, the guest vocalist on "Have A Cigar", trashed his trailer in July 1975. Roger Waters witnessed this as Pink Floyd were preparing for their epic opening of Knebworth Festival '75 which inspired Waters to write Pink's rage song, "One Of My Turns".
    • Similarly, Pink shaving his eyebrows in the movie is based on an incident from the Wish You Were Here (1975) sessions, where the band was recording "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", their tribute to founding member Syd Barrett, when they were randomly visited by a fat, bald, middle-aged man with shaved eyebrows; after several uncomfortable minutes, they realised it was Syd.
  • The movie's Body Horror sequence in "Comfortably Numb" as Pink is carried down the hall is believed to be also a reference to Barrett's alleged habit of crushing Quaaludes and mixing them with his hair cream before going on-stage, so that they would melt as the concert progressed, making him look like what Roger Waters described as "a guttered candle."
  • In the Special Edition DVD of The Movie, Roger Waters' DVD Commentary ends with him casually saying "Isn't this where we came in?"
  • The opening song and the song where Pink has descended into the depths of his insanity are both called "In the Flesh". An incident on the In the Flesh Tour, which was to promote their last album, Animals, inspired this album.
    • On The Wall Analysis' Facebook page, someone pointed out that the stadium-like building depicted on the album looks like a fantasia of the Montreal Olympic stadium, where the spitting incident took place.
  • The two note bass-line in "Goodbye Cruel World" sounds similar to the one at the end of "See Emily Play".
  • The eponymous wall is a reference to the last verse of "Echoes" from Meddle: "And through the window in the wall comes streaming in on sunlight wings / a million bright ambassadors of morning". The full version of "Echoes" carries a number of themes that seem to link in to the same patterns: disconnection, loss of communication, and after a long (instrumental) struggle, re-connection, when the singer at the end of the song can "throw the windows wide and call to you across the skies". This wall, at least, has a window.

N-P

• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Pink's Hammers take cues from Benito Mussolini's black shirts, SS troopers, and the KKK/skinheads. "Waiting for the Worms" doesn't really bother to try to disguise the fact that they are neo-Nazis, as the lyrics reference the Holocaust with "the final solution to strengthen the strain" and "waiting to turn on the showers and fire the ovens". The Hammers, in turn, inspired one of the more prominent real-life Neo-Nazi Skinhead groups to name themselves "Hammerskins" and to appropriate the marching hammers symbol as their own.
• Never Be Hurt Again: This is Pink's motivation for building the Wall. It turns out to not be such a good idea when completed, as it basically isolates him from everything.
• Never My Fault: This underlies a lot of Pink's relationship with his wife. On an objective level, he knows that she had good reasons to want to cheat on him—depending on how you view it, those reasons can include severe emotional distance and apathy, infidelity on his part, or physical abuse—but whenever he thinks of her in the film's animated sequences, he views her as a horrifying, predatory monster that savages his tiny helpless body. He may recognize it's his fault, but that doesn't remove the feelings of betrayal that cause him to view her as attacking him for no reason.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Worm, Your Honour punishes Pink for "showing feelings of an almost human nature" by ordering the wall torn down, but of course Pink is better off without it.
• Nightmarish Factory: The "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" scene depicts post-WW2 British school system as an ominously lit and labyrinthine factory in which children are marched through machines and conveyor belts of doom that morph them into freaks with the same Facial Horror before making them walk down into a meat-grinder.
• No Antagonist: The album is really about Pink's inner demons, how they got there and how they may have been overcome. There's no real antagonist for Pink, as he is his own worst enemy.
• Non-Appearing Title: Both versions of "In the Flesh", "Another Brick in the Wall" parts I and III, "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", "Young Lust", "Run Like Hell" (the lyrics "You better run like hell" appeared to have been dropped from the song at the last minute, judging by the liner notes), and "The Trial" all lack their titles in their lyrics. In concert, there's also the Reprise Medley of "The Last Few Bricks", which has no lyrics.
• Non-Indicative Title: "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" doesn't refer to particularly happy days in Pink's life, though considering how bad his life has been, they may very well be the happiest days of his life.
• No Swastikas: The Double Hammer sign.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The original Textless Album Cover, a featureless wall of white bricks.
• Once More, with Clarity: On the "Wall Live 1980-1981" tour CD, emcee Gary Yudman introduces the band before "In the Flesh?" He's the typical, peppy emcee, delivering his lines with verve. He reappears before "In the Flesh," and he introduces the Surrogate Band with all the peppy verve of a zombie. Nothing, not even the emcee, is safe from the shadow of the wall.
• The Oner: The film's opening sequence of the camera moving down the hotel hallway.
• One-Woman Song: "Vera".
• One-Word Title: "Stop", "Vera", and "Mother".
• Parent-Induced Extended Childhood: Occurs symbolically in the film, where, during "The Trial", Pink imagines himself confronted by his notoriously controlling mother, who literally connects herself to Pink via an umbilical cord and spends most of her time in the spotlight holding Pink's shrunken, doll-like form in her arms like an infant as she begs for the judge to let her take her condemned son home.
• Paranoia Fuel: Invoked by Roger himself. During the tour, Roger would sometimes introduce "Run Like Hell" by saying it was for "all the paranoids in the audience."
• Patriotic Fervor: Yet another layer of fascist imagery in "Waiting for the Worms"
  Would you like to see Britannia rule again, my friend?
• The Peeping Tom: In the film, during "Mother", young Pink spies on a neighbor girl undressing with a pair of binoculars.
• Performance Anxiety: Pink suffers from this during "The Show Must Go On". Made most clear in the extended version they played in concert:
  Do I have to stand up
  Wild-eyed in the spotlight?
  What a nightmare
  Why don't I turn and run?
• Please, Don't Leave Me: "Don't Leave Me Now" takes a dark spin on this: Pink sees the last meaningful connection he had to outside society slip away when his marriage with his wife finally collapses in on itself, and begs her to stay with him... because he's dependent on abusing her. Her departure ends up being what sends Pink over the edge.
• Plot-Inciting Infidelity: In a roundabout way, when Pink finds out during a collect call about his wife's infidelity, it spurs him to trace back all the steps that led to this point.
• Poor Communication Kills: The album's central theme. One school of thought says it applies literally to the ending.
• Poorly Lit Pareidolia: "Mother" portrays Pink being scared of shadows resembling faces on his bedroom ceiling.
• Product Placement: Outside the concert at the beginning, there is a "Feeling 7UP" soda billboard featuring Philadelphia Phillies baseball great Mike Schmidt. The fact he's grinning down at fans having the crap beaten out of them by cops makes it one that 7UP probably didn't want in the film. Knowing Roger Waters, that was probably the point.
• Psychosexual Horror: The movie has several animated scenes where sexual imagery is played for horror. The most prominent example is the "Don't Leave Me Now" sequence, in which a shadow of Pink's wife turns into a nightmarish mantis/butterfly/flower/vagina monster.
• Puppet Permutation: The Teacher. His puppet form is always seen being controlled by his wife, who is depicted as a horrifying giant.
• Putting on the Reich: The uniform Pink dons in "In the Flesh" is blatantly based off of Nazi uniforms, right down the the symbol on the armband, as well as taking cues from Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. This goes well with his descent into fascism.

Q-S

• Questioning Title?: "In the Flesh?", "What Shall We Do Now?", and "Is There Anybody Out There?"
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • As mentioned previously, the spitting incident on the In the Flesh Tour was the genesis for this album. It's telling that the Fascist Pink concert, as well as the How We Got Here moment that starts the album, are both named "In the Flesh". The gigantic stadium seen in the album's gatefold artwork looks like the Montreal Olympic Stadium on steroids.
  • Pink's childhood is based on Roger Waters' early life, including his father dying in the war and horrible experience in school. Pink's Sanity Slippage as an adult is based on Syd Barrett's own Creator Breakdown. He really did shave his eyebrows.
  • Waters said that "Comfortably Numb" was inspired by when he was suffering from hepatitis before a Philadelphia show on the In the Flesh tour, but was misdiagnosed by a doctor as having stomach cramps and injected with powerful tranquilisers, describing the experience of "trying to do a show when you can hardly lift your arm" as "the longest two hours of my life".
  • The phone operator at the end of "Young Lust" is based on an incident on the In The Flesh tour when Waters tried to call his ex-wife Judy Trim, only to have the phone answered by a man.
  • "One of My Turns" is based on a backstage incident at the band's 1975 Knebworth concert. Roy Harper, who did the vocal on "Have a Cigar", flew into a rage upon discovering his stage costume was missing, smashing up one of the band's vans. He also coincidentally cut his hand, as Pink does during the movie.
  • The heavy police presence at the beginning of the film is based on a real Pink Floyd show in Los Angeles from the In the Flesh tour.
• Really Gets Around:
  • Pink's envisioning of his wife during "The Trial" is... not kind, portraying her as a Gold Digger with handles on her waist with an exposed vagina. While she gets the most justified and acerbic lines criticising his behaviour.
  • Pink's own willingness to sleep around with groupies on the road and his hypocrisy at being angry at his wife for being (or seeming to be) unfaithful at home is well-implied.
• Rearrange the Song: Much of the album's material is remixed and re-recorded in the film adaptation; some portions are redone by the film's actors (e.g., Bob Geldof performing both parts of "In the Flesh", Alex McAvoy giving his version of the teacher's shouts during "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", and Jenny Wright performing Trudy Young's part as the groupie in "One of My Turns"). The only songs left untouched are "Goodbye Cruel World" and "Vera".
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: "The Trial", where the victim is persecuted in front of a jury.
• Record Producer: Bob Ezrin had a heavy influence over the album, making Roger Waters change the lyrics to make them more universal and less autobiographic and converting his concept into a 40-page script during the preliminary sessions, allowing the band to work on the album better. Co-producer James Guthrie was similarly praised by Gilmour and others for playing a key part in crafting the album's overall sound.
• Recurring Riff: A four-note riff is prevalent throughout the album, appearing on each of its fours sides at least once. It forms the backbone of all three parts of "Another Brick in the Wall" and prominently appears in "Hey You", "Waiting for the Worms", and "The Trial".
• Red and Black Totalitarianism: A red and black "crossed hammers" logo is associated with the unnamed fascist regime that Pink imagines himself as the leader of during the album's fourth side; the gatefold interior additionally depicts these hammers marching in goose-step. The film adaptation accentuates this further, showing the regime's members donning and flying red and black colors everywhere they go, punctuated by animated renditions of the marching hammers.
• Repression Never Ends Well: The entire theme behind the album. Because Pink has been trying to isolate himself ever since he was born without a father, he's never been able to express his problems naturally. He's only ever repressed them, which strains his relationships with his wife and his adoring fans, until it reaches a boiling point and explodes following the doctor's injection in "Comfortably Numb".
• Reprise Medley: During the live shows, the band would play a medley called "The Last Few Bricks" between "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)" and "Goodbye Cruel World" in order to give the stage-hands time to construct the titular wall. The recording of this medley found on the live album Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 includes material based on instrumental sections from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)", "Don't Leave Me Now", "Young Lust" and "Empty Spaces".
• Rescue Equipment Attack: In the movie, the kids smash up the school during "Another Brick in the Wall, (Part 2)" with fire axes.
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • "Comfortably Numb" was partially inspired by an article Waters read about Elvis Presley's personal physician, George C. Nichopoulos, who kept the increasingly decrepit star pumped full of prescription drugs so he could perform.
  • Waters' solo version protested The War on Terror in The New '10s.
• Rock-Star Song: More like a Rock Star Album. The whole thing is about the disillusionment and isolation fame brings, intermingled with emotional wounds from a tough childhood, post WWII, and its overall message is that isolation is immensely destructive to a person.
• Roger Rabbit Effect: During the movie version of "Don't Leave Me Now". A live action Pink is being attacked by his animated perspective of his wife.
• Sadist Teacher: "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", which provides the page quote for that page, and "Another Brick in the Wall Part II", is about the cruel and authoritarian teachers of Pink's day, who were out to hurt the kids they were in charge of any way they could. In the movie, it's made clear that the teacher featured is one of just these people, when he grabs Pink's book of poems, reads one of them aloud to the class ^note Which is "Money", by the way, then calls it absolute rubbish.
• Safety in Indifference: Pink comes to the conclusion that there is safety in indifference during "Another Brick In The Wall Part III", angrily declaring what the world has shown him:
  I don't need no arms around me,
  And I don't need no drugs to calm me!
  I have seen the writing on the wall,
  Don't think I need anything at all!
  No! Don't think I need anything at all!
  All In all it was all just bricks in the wall
  All in all, you were all just bricks in the wall!
• Sanity Slippage Song. It's practically a Sanity Slippage Album. "One of My Turns" is where Pink first snaps. "The Trial" may be where it's most overt though. A list of the sanity slippage songs in order: "Empty Spaces" (kinda), "One of My Turns", "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)", "In the Flesh", and "The Trial".
  Crazy! Toys in the attic, I am crazy!
• Saving the World With Art: The ultimate moral of the story, as told in "Outside the Wall".
  Some hand in hand, some gathered together in bands
  The bleeding hearts and artists make their stand
  But when they've given you their all, some stagger and fall
  After all, it's not easy, banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.
• Scare Chord: In the 1980-81 live shows, "In The Flesh?" would be introduced by an emcee as the band gradually tuned up and counted in the song in the background. "In The Flesh" has the band interrupt the emcee mid-sentence with no warning whatsoever.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Pink acknowledges he's fully responsible for everything he does. The Trial is him putting himself on Trial.
  • "Empty Spaces" has a backmasked message that pokes fun at the "subliminal messaging" urban legend, asking listeners to send their answer to Old Pink "care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont-" before someone else interrupts to let Roger know his wife has called.
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: "Young Lust", and, according to Nicholas Schaffner's 1991 book Saucerful Of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, the passage in "Nobody Home" that ends "I've got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains", is about keyboardist Richard Wright, who was suffering from a massive cocaine problem at the time.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Several tracks on The Final Cut reveal the teacher to be one.
• Shout-Out:
  • "Vera" is named after and centers around Vera Lynn, a musician who was very popular during World War II, quoting her song "We'll Meet Again". Lynn's song "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot" was additionally used as an introductory song for live shows during the album's supporting tour, being featured at the start of the film adaptation for this reason.
  • The "Another Brick in the Wall" sequence is a shout out to Metropolis, with schoolchildren playing the part of the workers from said movie.
  • "I've got the obligatory Hendrix perm," in "Nobody Home" (NB: Syd Barrett had one, too).
  • The album begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence, just like Finnegans Wake.
  • The male backing vocals are inspired by The Beach Boys. As noted on the Trivia tab, they were originally going to be The Beach Boys, but didn't turn up for the sessions, except for Bruce Johnston.
  • Pink apparently spends his time in the hotel watching Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and Gunsmoke. In the movie, The Dam Busters seems to be perpetually on the TV. (NB: It's a movie that's all about blowing up walls.)
  • A subtle one both visually and thematically are Pink's skeletal hands reaching out during "Is Anybody Out There" to Greed.
  • Among Bob Hoskins' Angrish during "Comfortably Numb," one can hear "I never had this trouble with Cliff!"
• The Show Must Go On: There's an actual song on the album with this exact title. To be more specific, Pink's trip through his past is interrupted by drugs injected at the request of his stage manager and driven to the concert, while wondering where the feeling has gone and whether he would remember the songs.
• Shown Their Work: Well, a rock band talking about the life of a rock star is a given, but musicians will nod their hands at lyrics such as "my hands felt like two balloons", and especially the lyrics from "Nobody Home" when Waters sings about "the inevitable pinhole burns all down the front of my favourite satin shirt / I've got nicotine stains on my fingers / I've got a silver spoon on a chain."
• Siamese Twin Songs:
  • "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" → "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)"
  • "Empty Spaces" → "Young Lust" on the studio version—when played live, "What Shall We Do Now?" follows "Empty Spaces", and "Young Lust" has its own extended intro.
• Sickening "Crunch!": One can be heard during "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", just after the first verse if one listens closely.
• Single-Issue Psychology: Completely and utterly averted. The work explores how Pink's mental state is influenced by a myriad of factors stemming from his childhood, societal ills, treatment by exploitative music industry, substance abuse and many, many more.
• Sinister Shades: In live performances of the album (or at least the material from side four), Roger Waters dons a set of aviator shades when playing the part of Fascist Pink, invoking the sunglasses' association with dictators to tie into the character's ruthless nature.
• Skyward Scream: Pink lets one out during the second verse of "Comfortably Numb" (with the film's scene depciting him screaming upward), right after the doctor assures him that a drug injection will be "just a little pinprick."
  There'll be no more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Slogan-Yelling Megaphone Guy: Pink yells into a megaphone about where they're going to meet and what they're waiting for in the middle of "Waiting For The Worms," and at the end, as he gets drowned out the crowd chanting "Hammer!" the things he says into it become more and more unintelligible.
• Smash Cut: "Waiting For The Worms" / "Stop". In the live shows, the March of the Hammers would suddenly cut to black. In the movie, it smash-cuts to Bob Geldof's screaming face.
• Spiteful Spit: After Roger Waters did this to a fan on the In the Flesh tour, he immediately had a "My God, What Have I Done?" moment that led to the creation this album.
• Split-Personality Takeover: Implied in "In the Flesh".
  I've got some bad news for you sunshine
  Pink isn't well, he stayed back at the hotel
  And they sent us along as a surrogate band
  We're gonna find out where you fans really stand
• Strange Salute: The hammer sign, done by holding both clenched fists overhead with their wrists crossed.
• Stuka Scream: "In The Flesh?" ends with one symbolising the death of Pink's father in World War II. The film actually depicts the moment of his death as a Stuka dives on his position, complete with Bomb Whistle.
• Stylistic Suck: "Young Lust", "In the Flesh", and "Run Like Hell". They're all songs that Pink himself is performing at concerts.
• Subliminal Seduction: The song "Empty Spaces" contains the amusingly self-referential, if kind of hard to make out since it's so buried in the mix, backwards message:
  Roger Waters: Congratulations, hunters, you've just discovered the secret message! Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont...
  James Guthrie:^note One of the album's producers (interrupts) Roger, Carolyne^note Roger's then-wife is on the phone.
  Roger Waters: Okay.
• Surprisingly Gentle Song: For being a famously depressing film/album, it's easy to forget both end with "Outside the Wall". But then...
• Symbolic Serene Submersion: During "The Thin Ice," Pink has a nightmare that involves floating in his pool, surrounded by dark clouds of blood. At first he thrashes and claws at his skin, but by the end of the song he has surrendered, and floats still in a Crucified Hero Shot, as though accepting his own drowning.

T-Z

• Take That!:
  • The lyrics "I've got nicotine stains on my fingers/Got a silver spoon on a chain/Got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains" are thought to refer to band member Richard Wright, who was allegedly struggling with an addiction to cocaine and was viewed as not pulling his weight by Waters during the recording of The Wall. He ended up being kicked out of the band during the recording sessions for The Wall, but was listed as a member on copies of the album, contributed to most of the songs and played keyboards on tour with the band as a session musician, being later reinstated as a full member after Waters' departure.
  • The "up against the wall" verse in "In the Flesh" is a scathing riff on Eric Clapton's infamous and then-recent "keep Britain white" rant, sharing the structure of asking if there are any minorities in the audience before ranting about how they all ought to be purged from British society.
  • Waters' commentary on the DVD is pretty much him insulting everyone involved with the film.
• Tempting Fate: Note to groupies: when a rock star indicates he has a headache and does nothing but sit still, get the fuck OUT.
• Textless Album Cover: The original LP cover was simply a featureless white brick wall, with the band and album title printed on a removable transparent sticker in a graffiti-like font. Later releases (particularly CD and digital reissues) incorporate the writing on the sticker into the artwork itself, averting this trope; nowadays, the version of the cover art with text is considered the de-facto canonical one.
• That Man Is Dead: After Pink's Freak Out when his wife leaves him, he is forced back on stage to perform—but emerges as a neo-Nazi, and announces his change in "In the Flesh" by claiming to be a new person. In live shows, it'll literally be another band.
  I've got some bad news for you, sunshine
  Pink isn't well, he stayed back at the hotel
  And they sent us along as a surrogate band
  We're gonna find out where you fans really stand
• This Is My Story: If you subscribe to the theory that "In the Flesh?" is a framing device for the rest of the story ^note The album as a whole is mind-screwy enough that it's hard to say whether or not it is a framing device, then it's an example of this.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Fascist Pink and his minions are obviously based on the Nazis.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Particularly after Pink's revival.
• Title Drop: "When the Tigers Broke Free Part II".
  It was dark all around/There was frost in the ground/When the Tigers Broke Free
  • All in all it's just Another Brick in the Wall
    • Let's face it, apart from the ones under Non-Appearing Title, every song in the album has its Title Drop (though some of them like "The Thin Ice" or "One of My Turns" make it more subtle).
• Title-Only Chorus: "Is There Anybody Out There?" simply consists of the title being repeated four times, before transitioning into a lonely guitar piece.
• Trash the Set: Pink's rampage through his hotel room in "One Of My Turns".
• Troubled Fetal Position: Pink assumes this position a few times throughout the movie.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Pink, at around age 10, is smoking in his bedroom while spying on an adult woman getting undressed.
• Uncommon Time: "Mother": the song is written in eighths, but the number of eighths per bar constantly shifts throughout the song. Nick Mason couldn't handle the different time signatures, and due to the tight schedule, had to be replaced by session drummer Jeff Porcaro.
• The Unintelligible: Some listeners have claimed they can understand Pink when he starts ranting and raving in a high pitched voice during "Waiting for the Worms". Nope. It's deliberately unintelligible nonsense.
• Unreliable Narrator: Pink. The broad strokes of his life are probably true, but he may be exaggerating some of the details. Waters emphasised this aspect in interviews with Tommy Vance promoting the album, drawing attention to how it's never explicitly stated whether Pink actually did abuse his wife the way he sings in "Don't Leave Me Now" or if he's simply "wallowing in depravity" after his fit of anger in the previous song, or how Pink's mother may not be anywhere near as prissy or cruel as she's depicted in "Mother". (The analysis points out that she always refers to herself in the third person, making it more likely that it's not actually her in the chorus, but Pink.) We can't really know for sure since nearly the entire album is told from his point-of-view anyway (the only character that actually has an independent voice is the groupie in "One Of My Turns").
• Unusual Euphemism: "Run Like Hell" has "pick her locks" for getting into a girl's pants/Auto Erotica.
• Vagina Dentata: Pink's cheating wife, who takes the form of a giant praying mantis (a species known for biting the head off its mate) with this for a mouth.
• Vicious Cycle:
  • The album's main theme is how the cycle of lack of communication perpetuates itself.
  • A secondary theme seen in "The Happiest Days Of Our Lives" is about the cycle of violence and unhappiness: the teacher is domestically abused at home by his wife, and reacts by lashing out in turn at the students and picking on them.
• Villain Song: "In the Flesh", "Run Like Hell", and "Waiting for the Worms" can be seen as this, given they're sung from the point of view of Pink's fascist persona.
• "The Villain Sucks" Song: "The Trial" in which Pink puts himself on trial, for "showing feelings of a almost human nature".
• Visionary Villain: Pink quite clearly spells out his vision for Britain in "Waiting For The Worms." It involves sending "our colored cousins home again" and implementing the "Final Solution to strengthen the strain" to allow Brittania to rule again, in his words,
• Visual Pun: The form of the Judge is a literalisation of the saying "the law is an ass".
• Vocal Tag Team: "Run Like Hell" is performed live with two vocalists. In the original Pink Floyd shows, the alternating lines were sung by David Gilmour and Roger Waters. Subsequent live performances with the Waters-less Floyd had Gilmour singing with touring bassist Guy Pratt as well as bassist Mickey Feat on his 1984 tour supporting his solo About Face album. Roger Waters, for his part, also trades lines with another vocalist in live solo versions.
• Voice of the Legion: The Judge, to some degree. In the film, his lyrics are subtly layered with two different voices fading in and out of each other among the main voice.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We don't know what becomes of Pink after the Wall comes down in "The Trial", as the next song (and the final track off the album) is "Outside the Wall", being a secondary-perspective of one invoking You Are Not Alone. While it is agreed that he tears down his mental wall and there will be a long journey for him to go on a road to recovery, it's just speculation after "The Trial". It's at least debated that the title track from The Final Cut could serve as an epilogue, but it's unknown for sure.
• World of Ham: "The Trial". Waters plays five different characters, each one hammier than the last. This is amplified in the Live In Berlin version, where each character is played by a different actor, but no less hammier. Standouts include Tim Curry as The Prosecutor, Ute Lemper as The Wife, and Albert Finney as The Judge.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": Fascist Pink asks his followers "Would you like to send our coloured cousins home again?" as a euphemism for starting a race war. This is quite similar to how the Nazis originally claimed they wanted to relocate the Jews to Madagascar to cover up the Holocaust.
• You Answered Your Own Question: At the end of "One Of My Turns", having trashed his hotel room and had a huge temper tantrum, part of it including more or less threatening to defenestrate the groupie he'd just brought along, Pink ends by asking:
  Or would you like to call the cops;
  do you think it's time I stopped?
  Why are you running away?
• You Are Not Alone: "Outside the Wall" is all about this trope.
  All alone, or in twos
  the ones who really love you
  Walk up and down outside the wall.
• You Are What You Hate: A recurring theme. Pink becomes a fascist, the very thing his father had died fighting against, as noted in the later songs "In the Flesh", "Run Like Hell", and "Waiting for the Worms". And he tries to rebel against the conformity of his school by becoming a rock star, only to realize that his teenage fans are so mindlessly devoted to him that they've forgotten how to think for themselves—making him, in his own way, just as oppressive as his teachers once were.
• "You!" Exclamation: "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" begins with one from the teacher, screaming at Pink from a helicopter (a train track in the film). Another similar exclamation is present at the end of the album version of "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", specifically singling out "you behind the bike sheds."
• You Won't Feel a Thing!: The doctor from "Comfortably Numb" says as much, followed by a scream from poor Pink.
  Okay, just a little pinprick, There'll be no more (scream), but you may feel a little sick.

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Goodbye, all you Tropers, there's nothing you can say to make me change my mind. Goodbye...

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Isn't this where–