The text does not have a politics which is separable from the determinations which work upon it or the position it occupies within the disposition of the field of cultural relations. The task ... is that of ACTIVELY POLITICIZING the text, of MAKING ITS POLITICS FOR IT, by producing a new position for it within the field of cultural relations and, thereby, new forms of use and effectivity within the broader social process. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism
You'll just have to claw your way through the Disguise... Pink Floyd, The Wall (1979)
An approach to a text such as the Pink Floyd album allows us three important opportunities: to see a text that is presently in an ambivalent position within the field of cultural relations; to look at the difficulties involved in approaching a mixed-media text; and (most importantly here) to con a text, to actively politicize it.
My interest in the album was first aroused by a student's paper on The Wall1.The Wall, it was claimed, possessed a complex form as it addresses the audience within the form about the form. The album could be observed, in a sense, as a modern epic with an accumulation of musical motifs, a chorus, a developing narrative, projected personae and intricate ideological patterning (centred on 'the artist' and class struggle within/against engulfing institutions). Most interestingly, it was claimed, there were levels of irony operating between the music and the lyrics (as well as in the lyrics on their own) that appeared to throw the surface text into its opposite meaning. The Wall, it seems, can be seen as a complex ideological statement, an ironic, parodic, self-reflexive performance, a new form. In responding to this possibility, in the process of my conning of the text, I will also consider possible multi-disciplinary approaches to the AUDIO-NARRATIVE that is The Wall. Of central interest will be the problems (and approaches to those problems) involved in any discussion of the production of ideological meaning by the pop-song album, in general, and The Wall, in particular.
I have called The Wall an audio-narrative. Yet, before the audio-narrative, comes — for most listeners and readers — the album cover and, perhaps, the live performance (or the film). My conning of the text was also mediated via two other responses. The first from Rolling Stone magazine (Blake, 1980: 88):
99 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
Pink Floyd's The Wall, complete with Spitfires, a wall 30 feet high by 150 feet long, and giant Gerald Scarfe cartoon inflatables arrived at Earls Court last week. In front of 75,000 people (15,000 a night for 5 nights) The Wall was performed to a universally hostile reaction from the critics and a universally enthusiastic response from the audience.
The second in a personal letter to a friend:
Took in "Pink Floyd Concert" was absolutely superb. More of a show really. Right thru the performance they built a white brick wall completely around the stage. On this they showed "surrealistic cartoons" accompanying the songs — brilliant, absolutely.
In terms of live performance, then: stunning, innovative, popular and multi-dimensional, with physical reinforcement and pictorial extensions of the audio-narrative act.
As for the album cover, one can launch into a semiotic analysis that is centrally concerned with 'placing' the following elements:
* the album cover called The Wall is a pictorial representation of a
wall
* there are gaps within the dominant wall motif (gaps in the wall)
* the lyrics are presented as rather elegant graffiti on a wall (the
writing on the wall)
* complex (and inter-locking) significations of space-age
domination, grotesque human manipulation and perverted
physical shaping
* information that identifies Roger Waters as dominant author of
words and lyrics
* the multi-national nature of The Wall production (including a
choir/voices from Islington Green School, album recorded in
France, produced in Los Angeles and New York — with extra-
textual knowledge that Pink Floyd is a British group)
* the text produced in 1979
The seemingly 'innocent' last of these elements (produced in 1979) becomes an important factor. When one discovers, later, that the musical styles in The Wall appear to cover a period from 1940-79, an ideological-overview potential is posited, a shaped 'historical' reaction is enabled.
The audio-narrative text is introduced by a short, lyrical (and peaceful) harmonic line that appears to signify a type of innocent celebration: Salvation Army? Trade Union Anthem? However brief this section is, there is importance here. For two reasons: as this audio-motif is repeated (in extended form) on the last track of the album, the overall impact is one of 'thematic' framing; in terms of initial impact (bearing in mind previous heavy-rock performances by Pink Floyd) one registers surprise, a dislocation of expectations.
100 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
However, conventional listener-expectations seem to be re-affirmed by the heavy, driving guitar lines that follow (with the ethereal-sounding guitar and synthesiser patterns producing the group's "intergalactic warblings") in "In the Flesh?" (Pink Floyd, 1974). There is that "warm thrill of confusion" and that "space cadet glow." Again, though, expectations are overtly challenged and there is a hint of the need to decode:
Tell me is something eluding you sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you'd like to find out what's behind these cold eyes?
You'll just have to claw your way through the Disguise...
Roland Barthes (1972: 180-81) writes of:
. .. a chance of exorcising music commentary and liberating it from the fatality of predication; rather than trying to change directly the language on music, it would be better to change the musical object itself as it presents itself to discourse, better to alter its level of perception or intellection, to displace the fringe of contact between music and language.
As the audio-narrative of The Wall develops, this appears as an illuminating insight: there is a. need for such an 'alteration' (bearing in mind Bennett's comments on producing a new position) and, more importantly, it becomes clear that Pink Floyd are themselves engaged (within the text) on a corresponding meta-musical, self-reflexive enterprise.
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"The Thin Ice" track, apart from opening the biographical/autobiographical line of the text (persona as baby), presents the first overt cliche: "skating/On the thin ice of modern life". The muted loud-speaker effect frames this presentation (as it does at significant points throughout the audio-narrative), rendering subversive the 'surface' stereotype lyric. Thus an implicit performance of challenge is under way. It is a challenge that knows about certain realities of popular music production, a challenge centred on the notion of the ideolect and (by extension) the sociolect. Barthes has claimed these terms as useful to designate (i) the language of the aphasic who does not understand other people and does not receive a message conforming to his own verbal patterns (ii) the 'style' of a writer, although this is always pervaded by certain verbal patterns coming from tradition that is, from the community (iii) as the language of a linguistic community (Barthes, 1977). Essentially, what is under way in The Wall (what is at stake, what is the motive force of ideology-production) is a critique of idiolect/sociolect discourse patterns in modern popular music embedded within a performance of those patterns. In the early part of the album attention is logically focused on the nostalgic lyric, the performance of ‘memory'. Nor, of course, is this a purely formal critique (it cannot be neutral, ideologically). Thus, wherever the thematic/temporal line halts:
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All in all it's just another brick in the wall
The integrated 'life-story' development of the audio-narrative (baby-school-teenage love-marital problems-drugs-isolation-flight-the trial: all, together and individually, central conventionalised clichés of the form)2 suggests that an approach through autobiography could be productive. It would be an approach not only to the persona/performer 'Roger Waters' but to a central metaphor of this text: the pop group as powerful, persecuted, isolated folk-heroes. In The Wall, Pink Floyd present themselves, especially on Sides 3 and 4, within a significant social boundary situation. This situation is seen to 'capture' the direction of their performance ("a surrogate band", taking a fascist position, is sent to perform — but, of course, it is/has to be still Pink Floyd!). One remembers, here, that in live performance the group build a wail between themselves and the audience.
The 'sound effects' (baby crying, planes diving, telephones buzzing and soon) dotted throughout the audio-narrative are certainly not gratuitous interventions:
Is everything in a narrative functional? Does everything, down to the slightest detail, have a meaning? Can narrative be divided up entirely into functional units? ... one could say that art is without noise (as that term is employed in information theory): art is a system which is pure, no unit ever goes wasted, however long, however loose, however tenuous may be the thread connecting it to one of the levels of the story. (Barthes, 1966:89-90).
Nothing, as my close 'reading' will demonstrate, goes wasted in The Wall All these extra-lyrical effects, though, demand a definition. They can be termed AUDIO-NARRATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS. Audio-narrative transformations: those bridging features that (in the first instance) postulate the continuing and connected meaningfulness of the developing narrative and then (on that basis) work to thematise the subsequent material. Perhaps the most striking example of a fully-integrated yet independently-active element of this type is the track titled (significantly) "Empty Spaces":
What shall we use to fill the empty
Spaces where we used to talk....
The question is the answer (at least, in spatial terms). The track is performed at slow speed (thus occupying more space!) and the whole formal nature of pop music performance is high-lighted by a segment akin — in literary terms — to the narrative conspiracy called metafiction. "Empty Spaces" is a self-reflexive objectification of transformational possibilities.
Several commentators on The Wall have noted the tendency earlier cited: through irony and paradox the surface text being thrown into
102 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
its opposite meaning. One response, [Pop Rock Special, 1980) for example, sees the album as a performance "that thrives on paradox, a record that uses saccharine-sweet instrumentation to underline many of its most dire messages". And it is in this area, I think, that one comes closest to the core of the production of meaning in The Wall (closest, that is, to the typical ideological mediations of this text). It is clearly not a matter, here, of simple parody or cultural 'changing' as present (for instance) in the handling of a song by the Australian group Redgum (1980) where the Beach Boys' "Surfin' U.S.A." is changed to a critique of capitalist formations in Australia:
Tell Malcolm we 're servin'
Servin' U.S.A.
The impact generated by major segments of The Wall is both more subtle and more interesting. Two instances of'paradox' will indicate the nature of this impact (though it is present, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout the album). In "Mother", sung to a conventional lullaby tune, something seems 'wrong'. The track opens with a range of questions:
Mother do you think they'll drop the bomb
[a simple question, the most urgent question, for that reason generally
censored]
Mother do you think they'll like the song
[who doubts it?]
Mother do you think they'll try to break my balls
lis this a child's song? balls: unusual inclusion]
and so on. Yet the musical performance, the lullaby, does nothing to indicate such strange manoeuvres. These lines, from the mother, are sung 'straight':
Hush now baby don't you cry
Mama's gonna make all of your
Nightmares come true
Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you
Similarly (though rather more strikingly) in "Waiting for the Worms", where there is a clear structure of political satire — aimed, it appears, at neo-fascist groups, these questions:
Would you like to see Britannia
Rule again my friend... (and)
Would you like to send our coloured cousins
Home again my friend...
bring a response that all one has to do is "follow the worms". The central point is lost, though, unless one hears these questions sung. They are sung — these banners of the strident Right — in the most
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melodic, gentle way (as if they are not at all offensive, as if they are part of a love song or a commercial jingle, or both!). Saccharine-sweet: just so.
There are, then, areas of overt dissonance at performative (and therefore at ideological) levels. Throughout "The Wall" this dissonance is evident, though not always to the same degree nor in the same manner of presentation. It can be produced by a single line (often indicated by the use of cliche) and/or by relatively self-contained tracks such as "The Trial", where the West End bourgeois musical-comedy mode provides the dissonant 'setting' for an authoritarian trial of the embattled individual. It would appear sensible to suggest that if one does/can register these areas of dissonance then there are 'normal' (conventional) areas of expected combinations of music and statement. One does not normally hear an election-message to the tune of "Little Jack Horner" (though times are changing) nor a love-lyric filled with hate. There is, in other words, a sociolect of Western pop music; a sociolect that does not exist (cannot exist) outside the field of dominant socio-political and ideological forces. How to define these patterns of 'normal' combinations? They can be termed IDEOTONES. Ideotones: audio-narrative units that appear to flow from (and suggest) seemingly inevitable conjunctions in the word/music area. In any extended work, such as The Wall or a classical symphony, these ideotones (in combination) gradually pattern the mosaic of a developing work-ideology. In the Pink Floyd album, there is an attempt to subvert conventional word/music combinations. Ideotones are performed both 'naturally' and with dissonance. One does not necessarily break the other.
A text, any text, is never uniform. Nor is its work-ideology. A text like The Wall demonstrates the knowledge that Roland Barthes (1968: 146) writes of:
... that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
It is in this context (particularly if the notion of ideotones is included) that I can really respond to the wit, the recognition and the subtlety of a track such as "One of my Turns'*. A mournful, existentialist lament in the style of Leonard Cohen, this song effectively identifies/performs the ideotone combinations present in this mode (at the same time 'distancing' them through a process of exaggeration). The lines:
I feel cold as a razor blade
Tight as a tourniquet
Dry as a funeral drum...
104 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
pin the ideotone to the wall before a modal change to aggressive lament (Rolling Stones) is juxtaposed against it.
Another method of ideotone-challenge employed in the text is demonstrated in the next track, another lament called "Don't leave me now". Here it is a case of sarcastic attack on the conventional male-dominated orientation of the form. A stereotype is involved (the self-pitying male to a departing female):
Usually the stereotype is a sad affair, since it is constituted by a necrosis of language ... Yet at the same time it cannot but occasion a hugh burst of laughter... It is at once corny and solemn.
... But is it not possible to 'transcend' stereotypes instead of 'destroying' them? The wish is unrealistic; operators of language have no other activity at their command than that of emptying what is full ... (Barthes, 1971 a: 199)
How do Pink Floyd 'empty' the stereotype in this case: by substituting the self-interested motives of the lover for the conventionalised ideotones of love-in-music. The deserted male laments:
I need you Babe
To put through the shredder
In front of my friends
To beat to a pulp on a Saturday night...
It is not necessary to put the point more strongly: clearly more than artistic tones/roles are under debate here. And there are many ways (it seems) to 'empty' the stereotype. It can be placed under such stress that — musically, at least — it almost self-destructs. In "Bring the boys back home" the military-type beat and screaming voices combine to produce a veritable cacophony of sound that stretches the stereotyped ideotone towards nonsense.
Omnipresent in The Wall is the notion of alienation. The chorus (..."all just bricks in the wall... all just bricks in the wall") constantly foregrounds this motif. Given the connection between language and social identity, the demystification of audio-narrative patterns in this text (e.g. the 'emptying' of formal stereotypes) plays an important role in producing ideological meaning:
If the alienation of society still demands the demystification of languages (and notably the language of myths), the direction this combat must take is not ... that of critical decipherment but that of evaluation. Faced with all the writings of the world ... it is a question of estimating levels of reification, degrees of phraseological density ... Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakea-ble homogeneity (there is real force of meaning, a war of meanings): woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and key words... (Barthes, 1971 b: 168)
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A war of meanings, with stereotypes and obligatory final clauses. In the war of ideological meanings that is The Wall it seems apposite that Side 2 should be completed (as a form of final clause) by that most central pop music stereotype: "Goodbye Cruel World". Mystification remains mystification until it is seen as that.
In the "Nobody Home" track, Pink Floyd continue their presentation/debate of the alienated-individual ideotone. The man sings:
... I got elastic bands keeping my shoes on
Got those swollen hand blues
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T. V. to choose from ...
[with the T. V. echoing "choose from, choose from"!]
... I've got nicotine stains on my fingers
I've got a silver spoon on a chain
I've got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains...
and so on. What happens here, and indeed throughout the album, is the simultaneous acceptance and denunciation of the rhetoric of pop music (the values enshrined in the conventional ideotones). Alienation in work (in the work/text), alienation at work. There are two aspects, writes Karl Marx, of the act of alienation of practical activity:
(i) the relationship of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object which dominates him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world;
(it) the relationship of the worker to the act of production within labour. This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life... as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation as against the above-mentioned alienation of the thing. (Marx, 1973: 49).
Pink Floyd sing:
Stop
I wanna go home
Take off this uniform
And leave the show
And I'm waiting in this cell
Because I have to know
Have I been guilty all this time.
The Wall performs the knowledge of personal and social isolation, the knowledge of alienation.3
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The specific factors of ideological production in The Wall can be approached through Eagleton's 'Categories for a Materialist Criticism'. (Eagleton, 1976). As with the other methodologies developed for the study of literature, there is a necessity to alter/widen definitional boundaries in any approach to an audio-narrative. Yet, with Eagleton's categories, there appear to be few problems in transposition:
General Mode of Production ("a unity of certain forces and social relations of material production" — dominant economic mode — The Wall in a period of monopoly capitalism and international bourgeois hegemony).
Literary Mode of Production ("a unity of certain forces and social relations of literary production in a particular social formation" — Pink Floyd, the multi-national force of the Columbia Broadcasting System, royalties, the hit-parade phenomenon).
General Ideology ("a dominant ideological formation" — the values of the British ruling class, their theoretical expression, values in practice, the individual and the state, and the official post-war history of the United Kingdom in particular, together with the role of group/s termed, in "The Wall", the "bleeding hearts and the artists", the "ones who really love you").
Authorial Ideology ("the effect of the author's specific mode of biographical insertion" into General Ideology — over-determined by "a series of distinct factors: social class, sex, nationality, religion, geographical region and so on" — Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, intentional elements, self-reflexive practice, autobiographical factors).
Aesthetic Ideology (theories of music, critical practices, pop music traditions, genres, conventions, devices and discourses; the electronic-music age, expectations of/from Pink Floyd, instrumentation patterns, the thought-provoking lyric, the musical comedy mode, the lullaby, the lament, ideotones, and the status of the pop-song album: what does it/can it do?).
Text (The Wall, a specific audio-narrative — what does it signify ideologically? The role of the wall and the worms, satire on neo-fascism, the pervasive 'debate' on ideotones, the thrusts at self-pity and the ideology of romance, the foregrounding of alienation; the structured targets: the possessive mother, the school, the rock-music industry, the courts, the State and so on: the 'false' targets in "In the Flesh" and "Waiting for the Worms": " ... the queers and the coons/and the reds and the Jews").
These are all elements that combine to form the work-ideology of The Wall, a highly successful commercial album that appears (in a most ambivalent way) to denounce the system that ensures its success.
107 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
Ambivalence, dissonance, contradiction: Pink Floyd's The Wall. Given the complex ideological status/performance of the album, none of these terms are surprising:
Textual dissonances ... are the effect of the work's production of ideology. The text puts the ideology into contradiction, discloses the limits and absences which mark its relation to history, and in doing so puts itself into question, producing a lack and disorder within itself (Eagle ton, 1976:95)
Appropriately, nothing is more ambivalent or contradictory in The Wall than its ending. Out of the noise and rubble of the wall destroyed comes a gentle (almost rhapsodic) quietly-spoken segment "Outside the Wall":
All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall
Some hand in hand
Some gathering together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Make their stand
And when they 've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's Wall
Because the music employed is an extended production of the chords heard at the very beginning of the album, this section completes the form of the text. Yet is this also an ideotone under challenge: touching/meaningful or cliched/false? Perhaps both, because such fundamental ambivalence in the realm of ideology is both the power and the problem of Pink Floyd's audio-narrative. The text has been conned.
Hugh Webb teaches at Murdoch University.
108 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
Notes
1. The paper was presented by Helen Bradbury in the 1980 Murdoch Uni
versity course 'Popular Literature'.
2. Although 'the trial1, significantly, is rather less common.
3. The opening of the “Nobody Home" track typically performs this
knowledge. The first line reads/sings: "I've got a little black book with
my poems in". In performance this line is rendered twice. First by Roger
Waters seemingly shouting — with English accent — out of a window to
the 'real' world outside. Then, in the conventional ideotone of the
lament, the line is sung as the opening to his song.
4. In terms of spatial aspects, for example, one needs to account for ele-
ments such as the distancing impact of the loudspeaker voice where dis
tance implies falsity/alienation/control by dominant media-ideology).
The notion of atmospheric qualities can be broadened, for audio-
narrative, to encompass an investigation of the impact created by guitar-
synthesiser patterns.
References
Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979) pp. 167-68.
Barthes, R. (1972) "The Grain of the Voice", in Image — Music — Text (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977).
Barthes, R. (1977) Elements ofSemiology (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
Barthes, R. (1966) "Introduction to. the Structural Analysis of Narratives", in Image — Music — Text
Barthes, R. (1968) "The Death of the Author", in Image — Music — Text.
Barthes, R. (1971a) "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers", in Image — Music
— Text.
Barthes, R. (1971b) "Change the Object Itself: Mythology today", in Image
— Music — Text.
Blake, C. (1980) "London Notes", Rolling Stone No. 325-326, p.88.
Eagleton (1976) Criticism and Ideology (London: NLB, 1976) pp.45-60 and p.95.
Marx (1973) "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts", in Ernst Fischer, Marx in His Own Words (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p.49.
Pink Floyd, (1979) The Wall London, CBS. Extracts from the lyrics of this album are included by permission of the copyright holders, Chappell and Co. (Australia) Pty. Ltd., and Pink Floyd Music Limited.
Pop Rock Special (Fall, 1980) Vol. l,No.2.
Redgum, (1980) If You Don't Fight You Lose, Sydney, Larrikin.
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