Roger Waters: The Wall, Part 3 (Final)

Read PART 1 HERE
Read PART 2 HERE

After building his metaphorical “wall” of isolation with events from his past, Pink is now longing to break free from his self-imposed barrier. Then the dreamy synthesizers and vocals of ‘Comfortably Numb’ start to kick in, set to an equally dreamy animation of a wall slowly rotating and spiraling. During this song, Roger goes about the stage singing the majority of the vocals — while facing the wall. During the chorus in which Gilmour sang on the album version, a fellow by the name of Robbie Wyckoff sang in Gilmour’s place from atop the wall.In addition, the tour guitarist played on a platform overlooking the crowd. During the outro guitar solo, the scenery changed as Roger pounded on the wall, with animated bricks collapsing to give way to several pillars.

The sun came up behind the pillars, while a small choir provided backup for Robbie to sing ‘The Show Must Go On’, portraying Pink unsure of himself as he prepares to take the stage — in a surprising way for those unfamiliar to the album.

Once again, the familiar opening chords of the first ‘In The Flesh’ blared out, resounding through the arena, as this time, a giant inflatable pig was released, branded with graffiti and mishmash. Roger, now clad in a Nazi-esque uniform, sings what seem to be the same lyrics as the first installment, but soon taking a dark twist — “Pink isn’t well, he’s back at the hotel”, meaning Pink is still not in his normal state of mind, something to consider once he “commands” the audience to put “queers”, “coons”, “Jews”, and funnily enough, pot smokers, up against the wall. After the song’s last line, he pulls out a submachine gun from out of nowhere and starts firing into the crowd! — although there were no real bullets, just the sound effects.

Next, Roger dedicated this song to the paranoids — ‘Run Like Hell’ — as spotlights scanned the arena repeatedly as several things appeared on the wall over the course of the song. Among these were a darker twist to the iPod marketing scheme — iLead, iProtect, iFollow, and soon, iPay, shown next to a gravestone; as well as one of the final lines of George Orwell’s 1984:

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Basically, amidst his insanity, Pink has ironically turned into a figure similar to Adolf Hitler, the indirect cause of one of the first “bricks” in his wall… his father’s death in combat.

‘Waiting For The Worms’ then plays, as the background displayed several worms squirming in between the columns. After the soft verses, Roger pulls out a megaphone and starts ordering the people to carry out his “final solution”. His words soon turned into ramblings, as the crowd chant of “Hammer!” became increasingly louder, set to the iconic “marching hammers” animation from the film, until Roger screams ‘STOP!’ coming to a realization that he only has himself to blame for his wall, not the actions of others.

Then, the trippy kangaroo court scene of ‘The Trial’ begins to unfold, with Roger doing the voices of various characters, including the showman-like prosecutor, the stern and imposing judge, as well as his schoolmaster, his wife (with a strong accent!), and his mother. The judge’s sentence: “to be exposed before your [Pink’s] peers”. His command? “Tear down the wall!” The crowd soon joined in the chant of “Tear down the wall!” as a montage of scenes from the previous two hours began playing.

And then an explosion interrupted the climactic point of the set, as the wall actually came topping down, along with the release of red confetti.

Everything was silent for about a minute, until the strains of a mandolin became audible, starting ‘Outside the Wall’, with Roger remarking at the end, “Isn’t this where we came in?” The rest of the band joined him after a few minutes to make their bows and exit the stage.

I thought that this was more than just a “concert”. Heck, I don’t think you can even say that this was an ordinary concert. It was more of a spectacle — a well-orchestrated musical with awesome special effects and even the inclusion of off-stage props like the giant inflatables or the scale-model airplane. Roger didn’t need to interact with the audience that much. Rather, he let his works speak for themselves.

(10/10)

Roger Waters: The Wall, Part 2

 Read Part 1 HERE


We’re now at the point of the storyline where Pink slowly begins his downward spiral into isolation from the outside world. Along with earlier events and factors, like his father’s death in combat or his mother’s overprotective tendencies, some of the notable points here were the final “bricks in the wall” of self-imposed isolation.

The blues-rock style guitars started off ‘Young Lust’, remarkably more rock-and-roll sounding than any other song on the album. Here, Pink’s fame and fortune has brought on the inevitable craving for women and coitus, as clips of provocative naked women dancing were prominent in the background. The notable phone call at the end of the album version was played afterward, separate from the previous song.

Once you know what a collect call is, this call is somewhat amusing once you think about it enough.

 *random guy answers* ”Hello..?”
“Yes, a collect call for Mrs. Floyd from Mr. Floyd. Will you accept the charges from United States?”
*random guy hangs up*
“Oh, he hung up! That’s your residence, right? I wonder why he hung up? Is there supposed to be someone else there besides your wife there to answer?”
*operator tries again; random guy answers* ”Hello?”
“This is United States calling, are we reaching…”
*random guy hangs up again*
“See, he keeps hanging up! And it’s a man answering!”

Then, ‘One Of My Turns’ quietly starts off with a soft synthesizer drone at the beginning, along with dialogue between Pink and a groupie inside Pink’s vast apartment, although the background dialogue from the movie seems prominent as well. In the beginning of the song, Pink contemplates on how the love between him and his wife is slowly “turning gray”, but the sad dialogue gives way to another of Pink’s outbursts (apparently, this is only one of Pink’s “passing phases”). His actions and words are now violent in nature (“learning to fly”, as Pink put it, can be taken as jumping off the balcony), as scenes from the movie of Pink completely wrecking his apartment and possessions played in the background. In the end, the groupie is scared off, and Pink collapses into another soliloquy.

‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ is probably the most dissonant out of all the songs in the setlist, using augmented, minor seventh, and ninth chords. Even Roger’s voice quavers and oftentimes seems somewhat off pitch. Here, Pink’s conflicting emotions over his wife — loneliness and vengeance — clash, as his most sincere attempts at making amends transform into statements of violence, as in (When you know how I need you… to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night). The song ends in a drawn-out sequence of D minor and A minor chords, as it segues into ‘Another Brick In The Wall, Part 3’.

The final segment of ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ shows a deranged Pink refusing help from others, as Roger’s voice, as powerful as it already was, was accentuated by the piercing guitar chords and cymbal crashes. At this point, all of Pink’s past troubles are now “just bricks in the wall”, and the onstage wall that was only partly built at the start of the concert was one brick away from completion. The remaining gap was placed at Roger’s height, so that a small spotlight could shine on that very spot as he sang the last song before intermission.

As the rest of the instruments faded out, leaving only a quiet bass guitar, Roger sang his “goodbye” message to the outside world in — you guessed it — ‘Goodbye Cruel World’, as he placed the final brick in its gap.

When the lights were turned back on for the intermission, I was surprised but somewhat amused. (Actually, I wasn’t surprised at all.) Up near the roof of Joe Louis Arena was a huge cloud, presumably from pot smoke. Fun fact: two people in the row in front of me were actually passing around a joint, and my friends who also attended described a similar situation.

About fifteen minutes later, the quiet strains of ‘Hey You’ faded in from behind the wall. Note that the completed wall was at the height of the second balcony, and no one could see what was behind. This serves as an introduction piece to Act II, as Pink has now locked himself inside his apartment — the same one from ‘One Of My Turns’. But now, Pink begins to rethink his decision of isolating himself, as he tries to reach out to anyone — an idea reinforced in ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’, the next song.

The said song is highly instrumental, and features a quiet acoustic guitar with quieter accompaniment from the orchestra. Just one listen to the track and you’ll feel that haunting sensation of desolation coming from the melodies and overall lack of instruments or vocals or even sound effects. Note that at this point in time, everything is still going on from behind the wall, as Pink longs for someone to contact…

 …and that’s exactly what’s being implied in the next song, ‘Nobody Home’. With nothing else but a slow, bluesy piano, and later, the orchestra, as accompaniment, Pink starts listing off the few things he has left, since he’s lost nearly everything after his earlier outburst and his wife’s affair. There was a cleverly made inset of Pink’s apartment projected onto the wall, and Pink is shown with one of the only things he has left — his TV. Now, he is in an almost unconscious state, dozing off at the TV and/or doing drugs along with it.

Then, his questions become more numerous, as in the song ‘Vera’, recalling Vera Lynn, a 1940’s entertainer who provided optimism to the mainstream during World War II (I had to do some research on that one!). Pink now wonders if that optimism was in vain, recalling his father’s wartime death. However, uplifting video clips of soldiers from today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being reunited with their children played in the background, kinda foreshadowing the next song.

Pink now knows that he is not alone in his thinking, as a choir of voices resound the titular phrase of ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’. The song was accompanied by a brass fanfare as well as a powerful quote, displayed on the wall in sequence as the song went on…

“Every gun made
Every warship launched
Every rocket fired
Signifies, in the final sense,
A THEFT
From those who hunger
And are not fed
Those who are cold
And not clothed.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

But as his past comes back to haunt him in the form of the voices of previous “bricks in the wall”: his schoolmaster, the phone call, and the groupie, he realizes that he is still deep in isolation. But all that was about to change. Among the amalgam of voices at the end of the song, I was able to make out a new voice: someone knocking on a door, then saying “Time to go!” as if it was a foreshadowing of what comes next.

Read PART 3 HERE

Roger Waters: The Wall

(Part one of a three-part series)

A spectacle based on the album of the same title, Roger Waters’ concert event The Wall brings the 1979 album to life on stage. Presenting the entire album in its full glory, Waters portrays the story of a rock musician building — and then breaking — his metaphorical ‘wall’ of isolation. Choreographed with painstaking focus on detail, this concert event certainly does a great job at presenting the album live.

The concert opened with the wall partially built. Then, there was a short introductory scene with soldiers talking, presumably from World War II, followed by the booming opening chords of ‘In The Flesh?’. The opening and closing segments of the song were accompanied by stellar pyrotechnics and fireworks. To top it off, a model airplane on a zip line swooped in and crashed into the set at the end of the song.

The loud nature of the opening act gave in to the quieter, more drawn-out laments about life in ‘The Thin Ice’. In this song, our main character, Pink, is born, but quickly realizes that life will not be as easy as some people often say it is.

Pink quickly learns this in ‘Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1’. The song is a flashback to the days of World War II, when Pink’s father leaves for war. He is killed in combat in Anzio in 1944, only five months after Pink’s birth, analogous to the death of Roger’s own father. As the song played, images of soldiers killed in combat from past and present wars were displayed.

The song then segued into the famous helicopter intro of ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives’. Roger’s voice, mimicking that of a stern schoolmaster, pierces the air: “You! Yes, you! Stand… still laddie!” Later in the song, a giant inflatable figure of the iconic schoolmaster caricature from the motion picture came into view from behind the wall.

 As the previous song transitioned into ‘Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2’, the onstage wall became littered with snippets of graffiti. By the second verse, a group of local schoolchildren sang along with the lyrics, albeit not in the original British accent. The solo was extended significantly, and the song ended on a striking D minor power chord.

One of the new additions to the setlist was an alternate version of Another Brick In The Wall, sang in a much calmer style than Part 2. It served as a tribute to an innocent spectator in Britain (heading to one of The Wall shows) killed due to a bad case of police brutality and mistaken identity. Waters then sent a strong message to the Joe Louis Arena crowd: you can never trust the government and the police force.

 
The audience then cheered as the light acoustic strumming of ‘Mother’ faded in. Many supplements to the portrayal of the titular mother were present, including a towering figure of the mother from the motion picture, only shown briefly but with menacing red eyes piercing the dark. In addition, a graffiti message was present on the wall: the iconic “Big Brother” line from Orwell’s 1984, with a big red ‘M’ painted over the ‘Br’ in ‘Brother’. Several sayings in red then scrolled across the wall, often in other foreign languages, depicting the mother’s will to protect and reassure Pink.

Then, the quiet notes of ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ faded in. Although this song was actually about the Blitz — the World War II bombings of Britain — the animation that went along with the song said otherwise. Instead of bombs, red symbols were dropped out of planes — including the Christian crucifix, the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Communist hammer and sickle, and many corporate logos, including those of Shell, Mercedes, and McDonald’s.

The wall then turned black, as two flowers emerged from opposite sides of the wall, marking the beginning of ‘Empty Spaces’. The animation was identical to the movie, with the image of the two flowers violently engaging in coitus (bonus: the flowers actually look like certain reproductive parts). Roger, as Pink, then contemplates on how he could complete his metaphorical “wall”, as a real and imposing wall wraps around a city in the background.

Soon after, the wall rushes through several scenes: a flower transforming into barbed wire, a baby turning into a policeman and bashing a homeless person’s skull in, and finally, the wall demolishing a cathedral, as its bricks formed into a neon casino-like structure. ‘What Shall We Do Now?’, the original basis for ‘Empty Spaces’, is a social commentary on mankind’s materialistic tendencies, and although less obvious, it is also a foreshadowing of Pink’s growing craving for material goods.

 Read PART 2 HERE

E-books: A Double-Edged Approach to Education

Today, new technology is developed to replace many aspects of everyday life, often with the intention of improving current methods, making them quicker or simpler. Just one look around a metropolitan area demonstrates this. The growing need for simplicity and speed has led to various advancements over the years. This mindset has reduced communication time from months to mere seconds, and has made information accessible with just a few keystrokes.

An example of relatively new technology is the e-book. E-books, whose influence and sales have increased in the past few years, are virtual copies of a book designed to be read on all kinds of devices, including computers, smartphones, and e-readers. These e-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, are electronics exclusively designed for reading e-books and using the Internet. This novel idea has been met with both criticism and praise from all kinds of people, especially in the context of education.

Alas, technology cannot truly “replace” everything without retaining the same benefits of the original, and e-books are certainly no exception. Printed books are still an essential component of classroom education, and e-books still have many issues (e.g. practicality and cost-effectivity, accessibility, and their effect on the learning environment) preventing them from becoming widespread in schools. Despite this, e-readers still have exclusive and important benefits, like their portability and overall convenience.

In our technology-centric society, face-to-face interaction has been reduced by many of today’s new gadgets. Sure, it makes communication much quicker and research of information much easier, but it also encourages more time behind the screen of a laptop or a cell phone without true and genuine interaction. A disadvantage of online conversations (vis-a-vis personal interaction or face-to-face book discussion) is that it’s much harder to express or convey your thoughts clearly than it is in, say, a group discussion in school. I’ve contributed to forum discussions on the Internet before, and trying to come up with replies that won’t be misinterpreted is difficult.

Printed books, however, can encourage more personal discussions with others, with one primary example being a book club. Here, members actually take the time to meet each other and discuss their opinions on several aspects of the book in a manner similar to most classroom discussions. This also fosters collaborative thinking, providing several outside-the-box interpretations from a variety of opinions (which has happened in my class several times), as opposed to the commonplace views forced upon you by summary websites, such as SparkNotes. In addition, printed books can give a more “authentic” feel for the story as if it was a freshly written manuscript, which can also help readers envision what went on in the novel’s era and place themselves into the story.

Another drawback to e-books is its lack of practicality and cost-effectivity in developing or third-world settings. Even in the United States, the Amazon Kindle still costs at least USD $200 (approximately PHP 8540), and each new book often requires an additional purchase. This puts e-reader devices like the Kindle out of reach for most people in third-world settings. Additionally, the absence of both Internet access (despite the Kindle’s capability of using a wireless network) and electricity (in most areas) provide obstacles.

Let’s say that you somehow do own a Kindle but have little to no electricity access. There’s no way to access your e-books when the battery (with a typical lifespan of one to two months) finally runs out. Additionally, credit cards are often required for purchasing e-books, but nearly everyone in such environments lacks credit cards. And on top of that, let’s say you do have a credit card and can purchase e-books. But without some kind of coverage by an Internet service provider, there’s no way you could even download any of them! Without any of these three key components, such e-books are rendered either inaccessible or present for a limited amount of time. This means it will be several more years before we can truly see e-readers as the educational norm.

But even if all these factors are present, especially in developed countries like the U.S., $200 for an e-reader just doesn’t seem worth it. Not only that, but you’d have to pay nearly ten dollars for every book you have to read for school — around the same price that bookstores sell them. In many cases, rather than having each student obtain their own copy of a certain book, teachers provide the copies of novels and textbooks. But the most cost-effective alternative for many students, however, is the public library.

Public libraries offer a variety of books from all kinds of topics for checkout, all at little or no cost to you. These libraries, especially in a certain metropolitan area, are often part of a library network, in which one portable and convenient “library card” can be used to borrow from a massive collection of novels, references, periodicals, etc. from multiple facilities in surrounding areas. Even if you can’t find the exact book you want to read, it’s almost certain that you’ll find an alternative reading from a similar genre or topic. When I was preparing for competitions and tests such as the National Geographic Bee, the Brain Bee, and the ACT and SAT college admission tests, the exact reference books I wanted weren’t present, but there were several other references that still helped. Whether you’re researching a topic or just looking to relax, libraries provide a much cheaper solution.

In addition, many e-readers are slowly straying from their original purposes (reading e-books and browsing the Internet) and beginning to make other applications, such as those for Facebook, available. This demonstrates how products such as Amazon’s newly released Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet are slowly metamorphosing e-readers into tablet devices (e.g. the iPad), therefore losing their original purpose as electronics exclusively for reading virtual books. The additional apps would easily detract from the user’s focus, and would be like having someone trying to read a book while a TV or a computer is right in front of him or her — not just at home, but also in places like the school library. This can lead to low grades or a lack of understanding of certain topics, and in my case, has disrupted my focus several times while studying, causing unwanted results on tests.

Although e-books do have their flaws, some of their features provide ease of access and convenience. For example, many e-readers have accessibility options that make it much less strenuous to read text, such as increasing the text size or using high contrast, both especially helpful for the visually impaired. Moreover, the screen and backlight provide enough light in the dark and reduce glare when reading outside. E-readers are also much more lightweight and take up less space than printed books, eliminating the hassle of having to carry multitudes of paperbacks and textbooks that can cause unnecessary strain to the body. Additionally, one single e-reader can hold hundreds to thousands of novels, newspapers, magazines, etc. in the volume of a thin paperback, also saving several trees in the process. This way, you can still catch up on any curricular or leisurely readings anywhere — from the beach to a long car trip — a convenient aspect I have taken advantage of while traveling. And with trusted references such as Encyclopedia Britannica going out of print and becoming available exclusively on the World Wide Web, e-readers may soon see these collections going on sale as easy-access reference guides.

In conclusion, both printed books and e-books have their own unique advantages. On one hand, printed books foster face-to-face interaction and collaboration, and are still more practical and cost-effective than their alternatives. On the other hand, e-books are much more portable and convenient than printed books, and can help save the environment as well. There’s no telling what new ideas will be the next revolution in e-books, but for now, I believe that the benefits of e-readers simply cannot outweigh those of printed books.

4.30.2012