Pink Floyd - "The Wall" turned 36!

If you ask a casual person, "What is madness?", He will most likely tell you that it is something like a brain disease in which a person permanently loses a connection with reality and he or she sees fiction or unreal things. This summary seems to be so widely accepted that it is rarely subject to comment. But in Pink Floyd's music, things look different. The soul crash of the founder of the group, Sid Barrett, leaves deep traces to the other members. Years later, when he's no longer world-renowned, they will put the topic of madness in their most successful albums. Woven by vague metaphors, allusions and ambiguous language, their texts give a different place to the madman - the place of a person who actually knows and understands something about the world, for which the rest remain blind. According to Roger Waters, "The Wall," the album has remained so popular, because it has something that constantly moves beneath the surface and resonates in our soul in a special way. In this album and in the film that is created the madness have central role. The songs pass the story of a madness with extreme insight and cruel, raw tone. Though intertwined with seemingly distant and sometimes strange reflections, the lyrics can clearly distinguish a life story. The main character is Pink, and his life story, like any other person, begins before he is born. The songs trace his childhood, marked by the absent father who is killed on the front while Pink is still a baby, and by the obsessing mother who wants nothing but him to stand beside her. From home, the story translates to his torturing penetration into society, represented in the image of a cruel school system. The classroom, which becomes an emblem of the entire album, crushes the individuality. In the school, the complex teachers are embarrassed by the pupils with almost sadistic pleasure. Years later, in his hallucinations, Pink will return to this school, where children carrying the same ominous masks on their faces are marching along streamlines to drop one at a time into the funnel of a large industrial meat grinder, where they go out pieces of mince.

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But in spite of ridicule and insults during adolescence, Pink becomes a musician - a "bleeding heart," as his teacher calls him, ridiculing his poetic inclinations. At the end of the first act - already as a famous musician - he seems to have been dragged into the false world of glory, light women, drugs and all the other extremes of rock stars (like the real Syd Barrett). But once he has achieved success and glory, his mental decline begins. The songs reveal the inner world of a person who escapes to the world in which others live. It's getting harder to fit in, gradually his marriage fails and he falls into complete isolation. Other people, their desires and aspirations become more and more foreign and incomprehensible. His attempts to reconnect with his wife are always greedy, desperate, and always strange. Gradually drifting down, he begins to see the terrifying everywhere around him - both in social and intimate relationships. In his thoughts and hallucinations the horror and the foolishness of war, the brutality of the public institutions, the madness of totalitarian ideology and the deadly tact of consumerism are intertwined. He sees the mother's love depicted as absorbing and suffocating, and the mother's embrace - like a wall. His wife is depicted as a gigantic ominous mantis who sucks on his body and the teacher as a hammer who wants to crush his mince (or perhaps make him a hammer just like himself). At the end of his story, now completely immersed in his madness, Pink understands that he is mad. In his final delirium, he faces the court of his own conscience and is judged to be mad, and by this he has ruined the lives of his relatives. In this last act, when everyone is blamed and mocked, it is depicted as a lifeless rag doll, thought to be an inanimate subject by the ominous grotesquely depicted characters of his story. And right here we are witnessing something that is far from that "break with reality". Here, at the peak of his madness, Pink encounters something that turns out to be more real to him than reality. And it is that he has always remained just an object in the hands of all these people, a piece of lively flesh that others enjoy and that is the terrifying truth about his place in the world. From the controlling mother who wants to keep him in the cage for a lifetime in order to love him forever, through the school system that treats him as a impersonal, soulless future worker, or the army for which he is just a piece of meat he needs to be bold and shaped. From his wife, who seemed never to be anything but a sexual object, to his musical protesters, for whom he is just another star whose glory will squeeze as much money as possible, and then throw it away in the garbage.

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To exist only to be subject to the enjoyment of others is unbearable to the human being, tantamount to living a dead man. The horrifying answer to an existential question from which Pink can not escape is the quintessence of his insanity. That is why, in his exceptional narrative, he does not break with reality, but rather the opposite. It really collapses, but its madness does not make it grotesque, chaotic and illogical - on the contrary, the world itself is revealed as such. In his madness, Pink begins to see an ominous dimension of both his own life and modernity. His horror is the inability to close his eyes. While "normal" can hold an internal distance from everything, Pink has only one salvation - complete isolation. Putting on the scene the sinister truth of his own life, he also understands one truth about the disgusting meat mincer of the consumer society and its lifestyle. Pink sees not just himself, but the modern man just as an object, a robotic, unskilled worker, a hammer in the endless army of the same hammers, or just as another brick in the wall. Once immersed in this terrible world, the desires and passions of others become strange, strange and even frightening. He can no longer connect with another human being, as others do. Society is exposed as brutal, inhuman and mercilessly exploiting, and its loved ones - like monstrous selfish beings who enjoy it as an object. Throughout his life, Pink builds the wall precisely to protect himself from the horror of a reality that neither adds nor conceals himself. And after all this is quite logical that in the great theatrical end, when the court finds it guilty beyond any doubt and deserving of the greatest weight of the law, his sentence is to realize his deepest fear - the wall to be destroyed and he to be "exposed" to the rest of the people (equally, perhaps, to death?). The crack of the wall is the end of history. Typically, in this narrative, the wall is associated with alienation, with some fundamental social obstacle, something imposed from the outside, which separates us. A barrier that the modern man must constantly fight to avoid losing the most precious - the relationship with other people. But this is precisely the great misunderstanding of history. Because even though Pink tries to get out of his prison, he actually needs his wall, and that's right in the heart of history. He himself has built it - it is the only thing that protects him from a world that he is unable to bear. His misfortune is actually predicted when he is born. The second song is a message to him that contains some of what he's about to understand in the most painful way: (The song, "Thin Ice")

Momma loves her baby
And daddy loves you too.
And the sea may look warm to you babe
And the sky may look blue
Ooooh baby
Ooooh baby blue
Oooooh babe.
If you should go skating
On the thin ice of modern life
Dragging behind you the silent reproach
Of a million tear-stained eyes
Don't be surprised when a crack in the ice
Appears under your feet
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind
With your fear flowing out behind you
As you claw the thin ice

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If Pink Floyd's previous albums such as "The Dark Side of the Moon" posed questions, as Roger Waters says, about humanity and whether it is capable of being human, the "Wall" is certainly their answer. The world is only seemingly "normal" or "human," and one can live in it only while it is able to push away from its consciousness and not know certain truths. He must not know the cost of his happiness and the paradox of his desires. He must be able to see himself as something more than a nut in the huge consumer machine. Only the ability to distance and not see the terrible in the world will allow him to live a "normal" life. The messages in this album are many and different, and interpretations can be done to infinity. But one thing is certain - Pink Floyd has a dimension of our fantasies, dreams, inventions, and even the madness that drives us beyond logical and rational and pushes us to things that may prove more real to our inner world, real than reality itself. Things we can not accept lightly and for which we can not think without questioning the coordinates of our own "reality". The music and lyrics of this album are bleak, harsh and tumultuous, but at the same time show a deep, deep humanity and compassion for the most reluctant and the most insane in our societies - the mad. An incredible respect for people who have something to tell us and whose absurdity is worth listening to.