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整理人: (2000-04-08 12:30:17), 站内信件
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★★★★★
This may be art rock's crowning masterpiece, but it is also something
more. With The Final Cut, Pink Floyd caps its career in classic form,
and leader Roger Waters–for whom the group has long since become litt
le more than a pseudonym–finally steps out from behind the "Wall" whe
re last we left him. The result is essentially a Roger Waters solo alb
um, and it's a superlative achievement on several levels. Not since Bo
b Dylan's "Masters of War" twenty years ago has a popular artist unlea
shed upon the world political order a moral contempt so corrosively co
nvincing, or a life-loving hatred so bracing and brilliantly sustained
. Dismissed in the past as a mere misogynist, a ranting crank, Waters
here finds his focus at last, and with it a new humanity. And with the
departure of keyboardist Richard Wright and his synthesizers–and the
advent of a new "holophonic" recording technique–the music has taken
on deep, mahogany-hued tones, mainly provided by piano, harmonium and
real strings. The effect of these internal shifts is all the more exh
ilarating for being totally unexpected. By comparison, in almost every
way, The Wall was only a warm-up.
The Final Cut began as a modest expansion upon the soundtrack of the f
ilm version of The Wall, with a few new songs added and its release sc
heduled for the latter half of 1982. In the interim, however, the movi
e, a grotesquely misconceived collaboration between Waters and directo
r Alan Parker, was released to a general thud of incomprehension. Arou
nd the same time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, irked by the unsee
mly antics of an Argentine despot, dispatched British troops halfway a
round the world to fight and die for the Falkland Islands.
That event, coming in the wake of his failed film statement, apparentl
y stirred Waters to an artistic epiphany. Out of the jumbled obsession
s of the original Wall album, he fastened on one primal and unifying o
bsession: the death of his father in the battle of Anzio in 1944. Thus
, on The Final Cut, a child's inability to accept the loss of the fath
er he never knew has become the grown man's refusal to accept the deat
h politics that decimate each succeeding generation and threaten ever
more clearly with each passing year to ultimately extinguish us all.
The album is dedicated to the memory of the long-lost Eric Fletcher Wa
ters, and in one of its most memorable moments, his now-middle-aged so
n bitterly envisions a "Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants a
nd kings," one and all welcome, be they pompous butchers in comic-oper
a uniforms or smug statesmen in expensive suits. He presents a ghastly
processional: "... please welcome Reagan and Haig/Mr. Begin and frien
d, Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley/Mr. Brezhnev and party.... And," he coos,
"now adding color, a group of anonymous Latin American meat packing g
litterati." With these "colonial wasters of life and limb" duly assemb
led, Waters inquires, with ominous delicacy: "Is everyone in?/Are you
having a nice time?/Now the final solution can be applied."
As fantasy, this has a certain primordial appeal. But Waters realizes
that all the Neanderthals will never be blown away. What concerns him
more is the inexplicable extent of fighting in the world when there se
ems so little left to defend. In "The Gunners Dream," a dying airman h
opes to the end that his death will be in the service of "the postwar
dream," for which the album stands as a requiem–the hope for a societ
y that offers "a place to stay/enough to eat," where "no one ever disa
ppears ... and maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control.
" But Waters, looking around him more than thirty-five years after the
war's end, can only ask: "Is it for this that daddy died?"
In the past, Waters might have dismissed the gunner's dream as an empt
y illusion from the outset. Instead, though, Waters insists on honorin
g his sacrifice: "We cannot just write off his final scene/Take heed o
f his dream/Take heed." Without a commitment to some objective values,
he seems to say, we sink into a brutalizing xenophobia – an "I'm all
right, Jack" condition explored with considerable brilliance in the w
ithering "Not Now John." In that song, the deepest human truths are ca
st aside in a frenzy "to compete with the wily Japanese": "There's too
many home fires burning/And not enough trees/So fuck all that/We've g
ot to get on with these."
With a Sixties-style soul-chick chorus bleating "Fuck all that!" in th
e background, and guitarist David Gilmour pile-driving power chords th
roughout, "Not Now John" qualifies as one of the most ferocious perfor
mances Pink Floyd has ever put on record. In the context of The Final
Cut, it is something of an oddity; for while the music has an innate a
rchitectural power that pulls one ever deeper into the album's concept
ual design, the performances and production are generally distinguishe
d by their restraint–even the fabled Floydian sound effects are reduc
ed to the occasional ticking clock or whooshing bomber. Attention is m
ostly devoted to the music's human textures: the gorgeous saxophone so
los of Raphael Ravenscroft, Ray Cooper's thundering percussion, shimme
ring string washes, the sometimes gospel-tinged piano of Michael Kamen
(who coproduced the album with Waters and James Guthrie) and, on ever
y track, the most passionate and detailed singing that Waters has ever
done.
Whether this will be their last album as a group (the official word is
no, but Wright is apparently gone for good, and even the faithful Nic
k Mason relinquishes his drum chair on one cut to session player Andy
Newmark) is not as compelling a question as where Waters will go with
what appears to be a new-found freedom. He plans to record a solo albu
m for his next project, and one hopes that just the novelty of becomin
g a full-fledged human will be enough to keep him profitably occupied
for many years to come.
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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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