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Outside the wall Even the post-Waters Floyd can't escape the confines of The Wall By Rick Karhu David Gilmour and the latter-day incarnation of Pink Floyd, it would seem, have had a love-hate relationship with The Wall. 
On one hand they are given to complaining about the rigors of the original show, the ridiculous scale to which Roger Waters had cast his vision of neo-fascist rock stardom, the pretentions, the conflicts, the author's refusal to budge on even the most trivial of issues. Most of us are well aware of the prolonged argument that broke out between Gilmour and Waters over a single drum fill in "Comfortably Numb." On the other hand, the band, even in Waters' absence, appears to be peripherally interested in the very topics that The Wall sought to explore so thoroughly. A rock star's relationship to the audience. Highly personal mental anguish. War. Isolation. Indifference to the plight of others. Childhood traumas. These themes not only dominated the lyrics of The Wall, but surface from time-to-time in the output of the post-Waters Floyd. It is almost as if the band unconsciously recognizes the greatness of The Wall's thematic content without ever fully going over consciously to that conclusion. The most obvious examples of Pink Floyd's uncertain love for The Wall is the recent release of Is There Anybody Out There? While Waters, true to form, has frowned on the project to some degree (likening it to scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last few dollar bills) there is little evidence that post-Waters Floyd has done or will do anything just for the money. Is There Anybody Out There? is not only a fantastic album, but a long-overdue one at that, and it sits well on the shelf alongside other Floyd classics. I have a feeling that Gilmour wouldn't have helped in releasing it if he didn't have some vestigial affection for the original project. Still the screen is flickering One of the most striking post-Waters Floyd moments is "Runaway," the fourth song on Richard Wright's Broken China. It has been noted on more than one occasion and by more than one person that this tune bears a striking similarity to "Empty Spaces" both in mood and in the mechanical/sound rhythm in the background. The argument could be made that it's nothing more than coincidental. Going further with the comparison brings out more parallels, however. Broken China is about an inner struggle, about inner emptiness, very much like "Empty Spaces." That Broken China begins with the attendant traumas of childhood, explores isolation, has multiple characters who come and go throughout the album, and ends with a "Breakthrough" only furthers the sense that Wright is paying homage, even unconsciously, to The Wall. Almost a precursor to Broken China, "Wearing the Inside Out" on The Division Bell sounds to me like a nod to The Wall as well. It is musically quite different than anything on The Wall, but lyrically, the themes of isolation and self-destruction surface. Again, fairly common themes in the world of rock-and-roll lyrics, but the fact that the speaker in the song appears to have withdrawn and is taking solace in the television is a striking similarity to the events depicted in The Wall. (And yes, before you e-mail me, I am well aware that Anthony Moore wrote the lyrics for "Wearing the Inside Out" but at some point, those words were deemed suitable for the album by the band, so in that sense they are "their" lyrics.) Sea of faces, eyes upraised Rock stars have long dealt with the problems that come with their chosen field of work, and this includes the members of Pink Floyd. The long hours and isolation are common complaints, as well as the feeling of separation from the adoring crowds. It was the breakdown of that feeling into frustration that drove Waters artistically during the creation of The Wall. Waters asked the audience in 1980: "Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine?/Is this not what you expected to see?" In 1994, Gilmour asks those same crowds, "What do you want from me?" While Gilmour doesn't feel the necessity to dress in black and adorn the band with pseudo-fascist emblems, he does posit some difficult questions to his post-Floyd following: Do
you want my blood Hell opened up and put on sale The Wall was a perfect showcase for Waters to explore one of his more persistent personal demons: mankind's tendency to kill one another. It is hardly worth arguing that Waters, for whom the topic is no doubt a highly personal one, is far more passionate about his convictions. This doesn't stop Gilmour from approaching the topic. Not always a fan favorite, "Dogs of War" explored the issue with an almost Waters-like litany. "On The Turning Away" is a finely crafted and moving piece about indifference to the plight of others. While Waters himself was celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall with his own resurrection of The Wall, Gilmour was being more Floydian than Waters with a heavy application of sarcasm to the event in "A Great Day for Freedom." "Yet Another Movie" is easily to most Wall-like moment in terms of the topic of war in the post-Waters repertoire. The lyrics consider the unreal nature of media images compared to the reality it pretends to depict. There is a sense in the lyrics that television and movies trivialize the issue of war, turn it into an amusement (and this was before Waters released Amused to Death!) He
has laughed and he has cried Pink (portrayed by Bob Geldof) spends a lot of time in The Wall, slumped in a chair with his eyes glued to similarly unreal and trivializing images of war, old movies, television shows. (My favorite is the snippet of "Gomer Pyle USMC" heard during "Nobody Home" on the album.) So while Gilmour and the post-Waters Floyd may openly express their irritation with The Wall, the artists in them clearly respond to its themes. It's no surprise. Most of us respond to them in one way or the other. Rick Karhu is editor of Spare Bricks
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