45. Another Brick in the Wall &...

Lyrics

Daddy's flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
Snapshot in the family album
Daddy what else did you leave for me?
Daddy, what'd'ja leave behind for me?!?
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall. "You! Yes, you! Stand still laddy!

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall. "Wrong, Do it again!"
"If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you
have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?"
"You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!

"The Bulls are already out there"
Pink: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!"
"This Roman Meal bakery thought you'd like to know." 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'll 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.


I've once read that all music is contextual, meaning that whether you like a certain peace of music or not depends very much on the context you hear that particular peace of music in. I love that statement and it is certainly true in this case. I am not a big fan of this song, but it really works well in the movie Pink Floyd The Wall. (obviously, I've linked this song to that movie). And I can say the same thing about pretty much every Pink Floyd song that appears in the movie.

The Movie: Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982)

This movie caught me by surprise. I was expecting to see a musical consisting of Pink Floyd songs. That's not what this movie really is. It is pretty much an experimental movie. It basically consists of 95 minutes of video clips of Pink Floyd songs, with at its center Another Brick in the Wall. There is a very loose narrative thread that holds all this clips together, but the best way to put it is that this is a slightly propagandist video essay about Roger Waters' ideas on society. It is one of the rare movies I've seen that relatively often employs the editing technique developed by the Soviets for their propaganda movies. In their movies they didn't always cut to drive the plot forward. But they cut to associate a certain thing with another thing. So they showed for example people exploiting the workers and then they cut to images of pigs, implying that the workers were treated like pigs. These cuts are not connected to each other chronologically. This movie does this very often too. At the beginning for example we see fans knocking at the door of Pink, the rock star protagonist (or antagonist) of this movie and nearly attacking him. Then we cut to a bunch of soldiers in the World War attacking the enemy. This association can be read in two ways. First of all it implies that Pink finds his idolization incredibly irritating, feeling as if he is being attacked by a war squad. Secondly it implies that the blind idolization of rock stars is as stupid as blindly trusting a government or loving a nation and going to war for it.

Both of those readings aren't really an example of great intellectual thinking. In fact, one could call them pretty silly. Unfortunately the movie has quite a lot of such observations. During the Another Brick in the Wall song for example, through Soviet-style cutting, children going to school are associated with people going to concentration camps. As you can see from the lyrics of the song Pink Floyd doesn't have a high opinion of education. Education according to Pink Floyd is just another brick in the wall. And the wall is basically the whole of modern society that makes us conformist and incapable of critical thinking. Pink Floyd sees us as prisoners of that society. And this movie is a call to non-conformism and critical thinking, hoping that in doing so we'll be free. The movie does not really know what then it would mean to be free. It just knows that we now aren't free. I can sympathize to a certain extent with this kind of ideas, but this movie does push them a bit too far and it doesn't always present them very intelligently, to say the least. Having said that, I actually liked the movie very much. The movie is refreshingly earnest, it takes its ideas very seriously and it is fully committed to them. Besides that, this movie is pretty much perfectly edited. Not only does its Soviet-style editing work very well, the music also fits the images rather perfectly. It is pretty much a joy to listen to and watch this movie.

I once read a criticism of  Dead Poets Society saying that the movie is asking you to conform to non-conformism. That is kind of what many movies about non-conformism do, even better ones than Dead Poets Society. And only are they asking you that, but they aren't really following their own message. Many of these movies are made in a conventional style, conforming themselves to the familiar rules of narrative film making. That makes sense. That style works and there have been too many great movies made that way to abandon it. But by being such a weird, experimental movie Pink Floyd The Wall, it is a rare movie that not only propagates non-conformism, but also 'behaves' in a non-conformist way. It puts its money where its mouth is. It is also the rare movie that states that we should think critically and actually allows for criticism of that statement. Throughout the movie, we are being constantly bombed with messages that modern society is bad and that we should think and act as individual people with a critical mind and stuff like that. And it is always obvious that this is Pink Floyd's message. But than at the end of the movie protagonist Pink becomes a fascist dictator, with countless fans blindly following his message and hurting and killing people. The parallel is obvious and quite daring. These final scenes are what to me made the movie really good. Not many movies are willing to look so critically at itself and act upon it.

It is unfortunate that a movie like this won't be made any time soon. This movie truly is a product of its time when people seriously believed that rock music could present serious ideas about the world we live in, and maybe even change it. Three years after this movie came out Bob Geldof, who plays Pink here, organized Live Aid, hoping that through rock music something substantial could be done about the poverty in Africa. These ideas were/are of course quite silly and naive. And it is probably for the best that we don't think so pretentiously any more about rock music. But this change hasn't necessarily been good for the quality of rock music. You are probably much more likely to make great, original and daring music (or art) if you truly believe that what you are doing can be of some great importance to society. This movie (and the four Pink Floyd songs I've discussed as part of this blog) made me appreciate Pink Floyd much more. So it is quite unfortunate that I won't be discussing Pink Floyd much more here. After having four songs in the top 50, there are now only four more Pink Floyd songs left in the whole rest of this list. And it will be a long while before we meet them again.