In the 2010s, society has finally accepted depression as a disease to be acknowledged and dealt with.
The lyrics hit hard, even if you don’t identify with the things that led Pink to madness: losing a father in a war, being an isolated rock star. Waters’ lyrics didn’t outweigh the music (which would often be the case on Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut and throughout Waters’ solo career). The album holds up remarkably well, forty years later, and will surely hold up for at least forty more. And of course, there was the 1982 film starring Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats (and future Band Aid/Live Aid founder) as Pink. The album led to an incredibly ambitious mini-tour, where a wall was built around the band during the performances – which only included songs from the album, played in sequence. The band began splintering during the recording of the album, with Waters firing founding keyboardist Richard Wright and re-hiring him as a touring musician. The main character in The Wall‘s narrative, “Pink,” seemed to be partially based on Waters, but also on former Floyd frontman Syd Barrett. Much of the story of The Wall is well known: Floyd’s leader Roger Waters began experiencing serious feelings of isolation from the audience on the Animals tour. And it’s a Pink Floyd album with a disco-influenced #1 single. It’s a double album with not a wasted second. The concept never weighs the album down there are at least eight songs on The Wall that are familiar even to casual rock radio listeners. The resulting album breathes rarified air: it’s a concept album that holds up, musically and lyrically, four decades later. All of those themes were focused into a single narrative on The Wall, released on November 30, 1979. Some of the themes these albums dealt included madness, loneliness, isolation, capitalism and the decline of civilization (and how that decline influences the way people treat each other). Pink Floyd’s double album rock opera The Wall came at the tail end of a streak of four nearly perfect albums, each distinctly different from what they’d done before: 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, 1975’s Wish You Were Here and 1977’s criminally underrated Animals. David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright from the band Pink Floyd