Things Most Overated: Pink Floyd's The Wall

Things that some people think are really awesome but which are not actually awesome at all. Who could possibly care? Irritable dweebs. So here I go:

Pink Floyd's 1979 The Wall. 23 times platinum. Rolling Stone's (lolwho?) 87th Album of all time. Perennial favourite of stoned old men with comfy chairs.

Fundamentally, it's not really what people think it is: People think that a) The Wall is some sort of concept album, or rock opera, and b) that that makes it really out of it. But it really isn't, and that really wouldn't anyway. First the 70s were full of albums with stories and themes and stuff, some of them good, all of them better than The Wall.

Second, what is the Wall's concept or story? There's some stuff from Water's life, some stuff from Barrett's... sort of... (covered better in earlier Floyd albums anyway), something about a Wall or whatever... around someone's... feelings. Well done. And then the spluttering cliche of pop music as facism. I guess. It could be even worse than that. Who cares. Read a fucking book or something.

The single is barely even a song. This is immediately obvious to anyone but me at age 13, and people who wear gumboots to the pub: Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 isn't really much of a song. It's one ridiculously dull riff over history's limpest drum beat. Then some kids sing... about not liking school so much. The solo is ok. But all his solos are ok. Which, when you're talking about rock, is to say that they completely fucking suck.

Most of the other 25 tracks are not really songs either. Seriously, stripped of their overblown context there'd only be like 3 tracks here that you could consider actual worthwhile songs. Adding in a bunch of sound effects, and tweaking a few names in the lyrics so it seems like there might be a story doesn't fix that. Randomly pick a song off the Wall, and tell me why you would ever want to listen to it. The odds are 1:8.6 that you're listening to a pretentious book-end.

Also there's the thing that's wrong with almost all Pink Floyd performances: They are so fucking weak. Not in the general sense "man that's weak". In the more concrete sense of simply having no rock in them. 99% of the time they sound like they're reading charts... like a stroppy band-leader is going to scold them for making mistakes. The drummer actually has zero feel. Somewhere after Obscured By Clouds Gimour's lead playing became a horribly 'adequate' self-parody. And basically they haven't committed a split second of energy, bite, or electricity to tape since Live in Pompeii (which is actually awesome... it's like a whole different band).

MetaPoints: a) I just googled "pink floyd over rated wall" and it seems I'm not the first to point this out. b) Who the fuck cares about whether or not Pink Floyd suck? Hopefully no one. c) And what the fuck is an album even? Yeah. But it's written now.

Coming soon... a review of some movie where it turns out in the end that things weren't what they seemed.