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整理人: (2000-04-08 12:30:17), 站内信件
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★★★★☆ (by user)
Though it in no way endangers the meisterwerk musical status of Dark S
ide of the Moon (still on the charts nearly seven years after its rele
ase), Pink Floyd's twelfth album, The Wall, is the most startling rhet
orical achievement in the group's singular, thirteen-year career. Stre
tching his talents over four sides, Floyd bassist Roger Waters, who wr
ote all the words and a majority of the music here, projects a dark, m
ultilayered vision of post-World War II Western (and especially Britis
h) society so unremittingly dismal and acidulous that it makes contemp
orary gloom-mongers such as Randy Newman or, say, Nico seem like Peter
Pan and Tinker Bell.
The Wall is a stunning synthesis of Waters' by now familiar thematic o
bsessions: the brutal misanthropy of Pink Floyd's last LP, Animals; Da
rk Side of the Moon's sour, middle-aged tristesse; the surprisingly sh
rewd perception that the music business is a microcosm of institutiona
l oppression (Wish You Were Here); and the dread of impending psychose
s that runs through all these records–plus a strongly felt antiwar an
imus that dates way back to 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets. But where A
nimals, for instance, suffered from self-centered smugness, the even m
ore abject The Wall leaps to life with a relentless lyrical rage that'
s clearly genuine and, in its painstaking particularity, ultimately ho
rrifying.
Fashioned as a kind of circular maze (the last words on side four begi
n a sentence completed by the first words on side one), The Wall offer
s no exit except madness from a world malevolently bent on crippling i
ts citizens at every level of endeavor. The process–for those of Wate
rs' generation, at least – begins at birth with the smothering distor
tions of mother love. Then there are some vaguely remembered upheavals
from the wartime Blitz:
Did you ever wonder
Why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?
In government-run schools, children are methodically tormented and hum
iliated by teachers whose comeuppance occurs when they go home at nigh
t and "their fat and/Psychopathic wives would thrash them/Within inche
s of their lives."
As Roger Waters sees it, even the most glittering success later in lif
e–in his case, international rock stardom–is a mockery because of mo
rtality. The halfhearted hope of interpersonal salvation that slightly
brightened Animals is gone, too: women are viewed as inscrutable sexu
al punching bags, and men (their immediate oppressors in a grand schem
e of oppression) are inevitably left alone to flail about in increasin
gly unbearable frustration. This wall of conditioning finally forms a
prison. And its pitiful inmate, by now practically catatonic, submits
to "The Trial"–a bizarre musical cataclysm out of Gilbert and Sulliva
n via Brecht and Weill – in which all of his past tormentors converge
for the long-awaited kill.
This is very tough stuff, and hardly the hallmark of a hit album. Whet
her or not The Wall succeeds commercially will probably depend on its
musical virtues, of which there are many. Longtime Pink Floyd fans wil
l find the requisite number of bone-crushing riffs and Saturn-bound gu
itar screams ("In the Flesh"), along with one of the loveliest ballads
the band has ever recorded ("Comfortably Numb –"). And the singing t
hroughout is–at last–truly firstrate, clear, impassioned. Listen to
the vocals in the frightening "One of My Turns," in which the deranged
rock-star narrator, his shattered synapses misfiring like wet firecra
ckers, screams at his groupie companion: "Would you like to learn to f
ly?/Would you like to see me try?"
Problems do arise, however. While The Wall's length is certainly justi
fied by the breadth of its thematic concerns, the music is stretched a
bit thin. Heavy-metal maestro Bob Ezrin, brought in to coproduce with
Roger, Waters and guitarist David Gilmour, adds a certain hard-rock c
onsciousness to a few cuts (especially the nearfunky "Young Lust") but
has generally been unable to match the high sonic gloss that engineer
Alan Parsons contributed to Dark Side of the Moon. Even Floydstarved
devotees may not be sucked into The Wall's relatively flat aural ambia
nce on first hearing. But when they finally are–and then get a good l
ook at that forbidding lyrical landscape – they may wonder which way
is out real fast.
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你说这班车可以把我送到天国去,怎么我觉得我在一步步接近地狱。
※ 来源:．月光软件站 http://www.moon-soft.com．[FROM: 202.106.215.122]
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