I got my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four from a yard sale for fifty cents. It was from the fifties, hardcover, grey like the life described within it; red-embossed text on the cover like the prole blood that Winston thought would redeem society. I had been just old enough to grasp the outlines of it, but not old enough to understand the implications. The telescreens, of course, would presage the always-on surveillance of smartphones and the social media world. Since it was the early 2000s, that was a long way off; I just had a sense of dread that something was amiss in the adult world, something I couldn’t name. But I didn’t have to—I was just a kid.
It would be years until I got a formal exegesis of the book—we never read it in high school or in college. This was maybe my first exposure to science fiction with a dystopian flavor. Serious stories that dealt with different worlds and possibilities, the complexities of relationships between characters in light of the governing rules so different than ours, the residue of a broken society smudged across social strata. Mostly, I put together my understanding of the book through connection with other cultural texts.
I finished the book and then promptly brought up the record player from the basement, spinning The Wall alongside many of the other artifacts I had pulled from the middens in the closet under the basement stairs, proto-archaeologist that I was. When I put this record on, it was clear that the cover belied the content—Orwell’s world was austere, almost too bare; Pink Floyd’s was a cathedral of sound, brick after brick stacked higher until the gilded baroque ornamentation of it was almost absurd. It was just as dramatic as the sonic universe Queen was building with their dyadic night at the opera and day at the races, but—of course—with the theatricality and musicality focused on the grim spectacle of politics. This was a dictatorship with jazz hands and big numbers.
The music didn’t feel like an album so much an extended segment of Orwell’s story. “Another Brick in the Wall” was reminiscent of the worst parts of my school experience, drilled into obedience, individuality scraped away. The sterile authority in “Hey You” and the paranoia in “Run Like Hell” echoed Winston’s fear of being caught, the inevitability of collapse. I didn’t have the vocabulary yet, but I felt the weight of it—that sense that walls could be built in your mind just as easily as in the world around you.
The album’s bombast—the children’s choirs, the fascist rally chants, the sound effects—sometimes felt like it was shouting at me instead of confiding in me. Where Nineteen Eighty-Four left space for my imagination to fill in the terror, The Wall filled every corner with spectacle, as if afraid I might miss the point. I half-loved that—it matched my own teenage intensity, my hunger for drama—but I also remember rolling my eyes at moments, sensing that the message was being driven in with a sledgehammer. And years later, when I saw the movie, it was clear how campy the whole affair was. Other bizarre animated films were much more to my taste. Even the theatrical flourishes—the marching hammers, the crowd chants—felt like the soundtrack of a cartoonish totalitarian dreamworld.
Even so, I remember sitting on my bedroom floor with headphones too big for my head, convinced I had stumbled onto some hidden knowledge: that books and music could talk to each other across decades, and that both were whispering warnings straight at me.
When I revisit The Wall now, it’s impossible not to hear its themes refracted through contemporary politics. Where Roger Waters framed the wall as a metaphor for alienation and fear, today we hear the word chanted at rallies as a solution, as though division could keep the world at bay. The crowd scenes in “In the Flesh” once seemed like exaggerated theater; now they echo the performative rage of mass politics, where chants, symbols, and scapegoats are deployed like stage props. The album’s obsession with isolation, control, and authoritarian spectacle feels uncomfortably current—what once struck me as pretense now reads as strangely prophetic. But if there had been a The Wall II composed during this period in history it would certainly be a “first as tragedy, then as farce” moment—the writing would be too on-the-nose for listeners to take seriously, perhaps Pink Floyd’s first comedy record?
The overwrought nature of the album feels almost like a warning in itself: how quickly righteous anger or personal hurt can inflate into grandiose spectacle, and how easy it is to confuse that spectacle for truth. This set of cultural dispositions had been brewing for a while, but even when it tipped into melodrama, that theatricality helped burn the feeling into me. I came away thinking that truth could be stark, like Orwell’s prose, or operatic, like Floyd’s music—and that somewhere between the two was where life actually lived.
Verdict: Keep
Do we need an education? We don’t need thought control…