Behind Roger Waters’ Wall

What the anti-Semitic fulminations of the Pink Floyd lyricist tell us about the intersection of art and toxic politics

Roger Waters performing his concept album The Wall in concert at Wembley Stadium, London, September 14, 2013, (Photo by Brian Rasic/Getty Images)

When I was growing up in the 1980s, a lonely, unhappy child of a brutal divorce involving severe mental illness, rock music meant the world to me. Of course, rock music has meant a lot to countless millions of teenagers down through the decades. But for me, it was a much-needed refuge from a bruising emotional reality, giving me a playground for my imagination.

I loved the music and the musicianship and the volume and the iconoclasm and the charismatic swagger. But I was also drawn to theatricality—to rock music that stretched beyond the limits of 3- and 4-minute pop songs to aim for something bigger, grander, and more ambitious: song cycles, rock operas, and concept albums. The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, along with Rush’s 2112 and Hemispheres, set my mind on fire, along with inspiring long sessions of furious air-guitar and -drumming.

But nothing gripped me like Pink Floyd’s double album The Wall.

Bricks in the Wall

The album’s origins are well-known to fans of the band. Beginning with Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s commercial and artistic breakthrough from 1973, bassist Roger Waters took over as the lyricist and primary conceptual force in the band. (He also came to write the lion’s share of the music.) On a stadium tour in support of their 1977 album Animals, an album-length misanthropic rant inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Waters suffered a mental break. Looking down at a delirious, screaming fan in the front row who showed no signs of actually listening to the music, Waters found himself growing furious at the disconnect between himself and his audience. Eventually, he snapped, spitting into the fan’s face.

Shaken by his actions and turning inward to examine its psychological sources, Waters came up with an idea: It would be incredibly powerful for Pink Floyd to perform its concerts from behind a wall separating the band from its own adoring fans. The wall would be a symbol of the alienation Waters felt that night from the stage, along with the dark feelings this alienation spawned within himself.

Two years later, this kernel of an idea had become something bigger: The concept behind one of the biggest-selling albums in rock history, a concert tour, and a movie—all of them titled, simply, The Wall, and all of them telling the story of a rock star named Pink Floyd. Pink’s father is killed at the battle of Anzio in World War II, depriving his son of paternal love. His mother is over-protective, sheltering (or smothering) him from the world. His teachers humiliate and abuse him in school. His wife is unfaithful and breaks his heart. Each of them is a brick in the metaphorical wall of Pink’s alienation.

Once the wall is complete, separating Pink from the world around him, including his legions of fans, his emotional state deteriorates, slipping toward insanity. On stage in concert, pumped full of drugs to get him through the show, his mind projects an image of himself as a fascist dictator who announces an intention to murder members of the crowd, which responds with rapturous applause to every accusation and assault. Once the show comes to an end, Pink is left alone and puts himself on trial, with mental composites of each of his personal tormentors (his teacher, his wife, his mother) accusing him of having pushed them away in the first place. As punishment, his own psyche sentences Pink to tear down the wall, making real human connection possible.

That’s where the album ends, on a note of hope. Except that the final sound on the record is a spoken voice reciting the start of a question: “Isn’t this where…” The completion of the question is heard as the very first sounds at the opening of the album: “… I came in?” We are meant to conclude that we have lived through one in a series of recurring cycles. Each night on tour, Pink builds the wall, succumbs to his own fascist impulses, and then punishes himself by tearing down the wall, which prepares for the cycle to begin again.

The album of The Wall is an extraordinary piece of rock art, with electric-guitar bombast woven together with beautiful orchestral and choral arrangements, complete with recurring musical motifs—and all of it bound together by multi-layered sound effects that give listeners the impression they’re taking part in something closer to a continuous theatrical performance than an album of discrete songs. I spent countless hours of my childhood listening to it from start to finish, lost in the music and story. To this day, I consider it the greatest concept album ever made and a high point of the rock era of popular music.

Seeing it performed live is even better—though it’s also more disturbing.

Pink Floyd mounted a short tour in support of the album in 1980 and 1981, but technology wasn’t advanced enough for them to realize its potential. This was no longer true when Roger Waters took it on the road with a large supporting band from 2010 to 2013. (Waters left Pink Floyd in 1982.)

For the first half of the show, as the band performs the songs, a wall is built across the stage, with the construction completed halfway through. At that point, the band is completely hidden from the audience. Over the next several songs, which take place in Pink’s hotel room as he watches TV and his memories merge with madness, temporary holes open up in the wall to reveal the alienated rock star in different settings while the wall itself serves as an enormous screen for the projection of surreal and disturbing animated images.

Then, once the drugged-up Pink is taken to perform, a concert-within-a-concert commences, with the immense, looming wall serving as the backdrop for a Nazi-style rally. Pink (played by Waters) dons dark sunglasses and a black leather trench coat while swastika-like banners and projections of crossed hammers on a field of white and red appear all over the wall and the arena. At the climax of one song, Pink/Waters fires a prop machine gun directly into the crowd, which naturally responds with rapturous cheers, thereby confirming the idea that originally inspired the album back in 1977. The show concludes with the wall collapsing onto the stage, tumbling bricks narrowly missing the front rows.

Seeing The Wall performed live, as I did in 2012, was a thoroughly exhilarating experience.

Waters and the Jews

There’s just one thing I’ve so far neglected to mention: Over the past decade or so, Roger Waters has revealed himself to be one of the Western world’s most prominent anti-Semites.