Análisis de “THE WALL” de "Pink Floyd"

ÍCARO

EXCELENCIA IAM

En Lectura Contextual II, los estudiantes de Contextual C y Gamma desarrollaron un ejercicio orientado a comprender cómo la música puede convertirse en una puerta de entrada para construir una mirada crítica sobre el mundo. A partir del análisis de un álbum musical conceptual, exploraron su estructura semántica, el contexto del autor, el lugar de enunciación y las posturas ideológicas presentes en la obra, así como los contextos sociales que influyen en la creación de discursos musicales.
Con estos insumos, cada estudiante elaboró una columna de opinión en la que construyó su propio Contexto de Lector, mostrando cómo sus experiencias, creencias y saberes influyen en la interpretación que hacen del álbum. Este proceso, además de fortalecer su pensamiento crítico, buscó afianzar su identidad personal y colectiva, al tiempo que promovió el reconocimiento y la valoración de la diversidad cultural expresada en la música.

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The album “The wall” by Pink Floyd as one of the most important in history of music is not only a critic to the WW2 and the consequences it left, but it is also a warn, a warn to not leave the people alone, to not let the conflicts break the people, to understand the problems not only in our society but also in each one of us.

Main Ideas about what the album expresses:

• The album directly portrays the transformation of a man, while indirectly depicting the same transformation in a post-war generation. Both subjects passed through all his life, from their childhood until they fell into madness, proving that the traumas suffered in life never healed and changed him and the into bad person.
• It´s a critic to the totalitarianism that suffered the UK after the WW2. Firstly, that post – war generation didn’t have a male presence during their childhood. Secondly, education was like a military entrainment. The teachers didn’t let the children think by themselves. Everything was so imposing, if the children didn’t obey the teachers, they would be hidden by them. (Some songs that express these two ideas are: Mother, Goodbye Blue Sky, and the two first parts of Another Brick In The Wall
• The album also resists the UK system for other reasons. Because that society cannot progress, because society was so vulnerable, the government preferred to hide their citizens and tried to make a new world with a military base.
• The album tries to give a perspective from the point of view of the soldiers, they try to make us understand how extreme where the war, how many pain it caused to everyone and that something that is calls “heroic” is in the reality a horrific situation and that should not be admire.

THE INFLUENCE IN OUR SOCIAL CONTEXT
For us, the album asks us some questions about our social context, like, Are we a broken generation, like the post war UK society? Or does exist an actual broken generation in Colombia, like our parents, our grandparents? How does that affect our childhood and then our beliefs of our country or security, or culture? Does it really affect us? Because we are not close to living an experience like a World War even our ancestors that lived in WWII weren’t affected by the war. But if WWII wasn’t relevant for us, there were other conflicts indoors. We know we didn’t live a World War, but in Colombia we’ve suffered a rupture of the culture and of the civic care. We’ve been fighting with the weaponed conflict and with the narcotraffic for about 60 years, millions of people have been stripped off their communities and homes, and nobody has answered to ease the extremely ridiculous pain that this Colombians have suffered and still. So that’s why this doubt has grown in us.

The album connects our actual situation with the idea of loneliness, in the album is caused by the war and the emptiness that left, but in our actual world the emptiness is caused because of people live more in isolation, and don’t prefer to connect with other people. That is the main reason that makes our era more depressed, lonely and distant all-time. The album shows a person going crazy and, in our era, this is more common and dangerous than ever, the suicides are in the higher numbers in history, and we can see the situation showed in the wall as one reality close to many people. We can say that the idea of creating your own wall is higher or more frequent right now, not for the same reasons.

The wall shows us how political decisions can change the way of common life and culture beneath the people. The album expressed how that decisions can strike the childhood of a whole generation, with make adolescents without a helpful way to be adults, and being susceptible like soldiers

To end this part, we want to talk about the overprotection lived by our parents, as we know our grandparents were the generation post-war, this made their way to raising their children more controlled. Obviously, their childhood was very limited because they couldn't try new things and depend in their fathers in almost everything. The album show this in the childhood of Pinky, a boy who has a mother overprotective and “prison him”. All of this helps the construction of “THE WALL”.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
Juan David: For me, I feel the album calls me with some ideas (or songs) like Mother or The Thin Ice, because during my 14 years of life I've been so overprotected by my parents. Aside from the school, I don’t normally interact with my around, like my neighborhood, or the cultural centres of the city without my parents. For example, I've been going to a basketball school like for 7 years, and it’s close to my house (around 7 minutes walking) and this is the first year I go alone to the trainments and talk more with my teammates, because I met them because of my parents talked to theirs. I also feel identified with another song, that is Comfortably Numb. That’s thank to the overprotection, that sometimes I can assume some emotional problems that are present in my life and I start creating my own wall and sometimes I finish like numb. That makes me lonely and lately I've been feeling much more than ever, and that finishes affecting my social relationships and my tolerance to others.

Mateo Ruiz: I may not see with my own eyes many problems that are a reality in our country, it’s normal, I am in a privileged position, but I have seen something more hidden, something that is affecting not only me but everyone I know. In my house, when I am with my father and my brother, it’s not rare to see us locked in our rooms, it is also not rare to see us communicating with the cellphone or computer, but in fact is rare to see us all together doing something, and even less something that doesn’t implies an electronic device. When I listened to “is anybody out there” I realized about this problem, about loneliness, and listening to “Empty spaces” showed me how this feeling, this problem, affected me, how it left a void inside me, but “hey you” was the one that made me finally understand the importance of looking for help, of don’t separate and fight to escape that void. This is a problem, because the interactions between us are far from being totally authentic, and the real thing is that my family is one of many more in this situation. That reality that I live in is the essence of the loneliness where my generation lives in, it builds not only a social wall but also an emotional and mental wall.

Thomas: My relationship with the album is in the part of the traumas, when something bad happens to me i don’t want to pass for similar situations because I think it’s going to happen again, or it’ll repeat and that’s why I avoid them. Also, I think about loneliness, when somebody is sad and depressed is like nobody helps him, all of this causes the person to isolate themselves and doesn’t try to ask for help. Both situations have happened to me, and when I listen to this album, I think about the consequences of not overcoming our problems and not asking for help to avoid staying like this anddoing something I might regret. The lesson that I have from the album is that I need to know when to ask for help for myself and that I also need to confront situations that make me uncomfortable, because if i don’t do this I can end up isolating myself.

CONCLUSION
All the 26 songs that appear in this album try to show a world with a broken society, when some people who feel bad are forgotten and this creates their isolation, showing the consequences of not seeking help and don’t offer your help to them. So, our conclusion is: We don’t have to pretend that the people whose facing a bad time don’t exist, and if we can help them, we must, because it’s what everybody would want if they were in that situation, we think this is happening in our context, and in the album, because the political problems or the internal problems in the country, which people priories them, and forget about everything.