Review of The Wall

http://popblerd.com/2013/03/20/blisterd-the-100-best-albums-of-the-70s-part-seven/

Released one month before the end of the decade, The Wall is the ultimate in seventies prog-rock excess, neatly packaged for a mass audience. It is a concept album taken to its limits, replete with an extravagant stage construction, a theatrical production including an ensemble of dramatic characters, a full orchestra, and eventually a feature-length film directed by Alan Parker. Released three years after the punk rebellion against such pretentious endeavors, the double album scoffs at punk’s minimalism and is unapologetic in its excess and pretense. The genius of the album is that its ostensible narrative is one that challenges the ethos of arena rock and the barriers between musicians and their audience in the genre, while simultaneously luxuriating in those very excesses. The Wall brutally criticizes the very thing that it exemplifies. In “Outside the Wall,” the final track and narrative denouement of the album, Roger Waters offers a glimmer of hope and a call to arms after over an hour of despair, pleading that “the bleeding hearts and the artists take their stand.” This anti-establishment idealism was seductive enough for over thirty million fans to demonstrate their commitment to those ideals, and shell out twenty bucks to the Columbia Recording Corporation.