Roger Waters Points ‘The Wall’ Toward Abuse of Power
By JON PARELES
Roger Waters projected his message stadium-wide, literally, when he brought his new production of “The Wall” to Yankee Stadium on Friday, starting a two-night stand. A white-brick wall, which is both an ideal video screen in concert and the central metaphor of the rock opera he wrote for the 1979 album by Pink Floyd (with additional music by the band’s guitarist, David Gilmour), spanned the stadium and towered 40 feet high.
The message Mr. Waters hammered home — with images including animated regiments of goose-stepping hammers on the march — was distrust of power and authority in many forms: parents, schools, celebrities, corporations, countries, ideologies. Throughout intermission (as elegiac music played), and at points during the concert, the names and faces of people killed by wars, terrorism and government actions were shown on the wall. Quotations from George Orwell, Franz Kafka and Dwight D. Eisenhower also appeared on it. At one point, animated bombers dropped corporate logos and religious symbols; “Run Like Hell” included a WikiLeaks video from an American helicopter firing on Iraqi journalists. Early in the concert, Mr. Waters deplored “all the victims of state terror all over the world,” and preached that giving governments, police and soldiers too much power was “a very steep and slippery slope to tyranny.”
To him, bigger and slicker did not mean better. Except, of course, at his stadium show.
The video wall, which his promoters have billed as “the largest projection surface ever toured in live entertainment,” isn’t the only huge special effect in “The Wall.” It’s an impeccable, stadium-sized show, magnifying even further what began, decades ago, as very private torments for what Mr. Waters, smiling broadly, called his “poor, miserable,” messed-up (he used a stronger term), “little Roger.” There are marionettes as tall as the wall, bursts of pyrotechnics, surround-sound effects that simulated fighter planes buzzing the stadium, a group of 15 children dancing through “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and — a Pink Floyd essential, even if it was from the cover of a different album — a pig-shaped balloon, now a black boar with tusks, painted with mock slogans. When animation warped and crumbled the wall, with flying bricks and metamorphosing colors, it was dazzling.
Actually, “The Wall” isn’t as unified as Mr. Waters’ latest attempt to focus it. It’s a mélange of ideas, ricocheting amid personal and political, insular and activist. Its protagonist, a certain Mr. Pink Floyd, is a rock star going insane. He’s a pampered, miserable, abusive, sleazy, insecure wreck, toying with groupies and numbing himself before going onstage. He’s also the grown-up version of a boy who lost his father in World War II, and who was traumatized by a vicious schoolmaster and an overbearing mother; the combined impact made him wall himself off from feelings. When he leads his band as part of the narrative, Mr. Floyd becomes a fascistic demagogue in sunglasses and a leather trench coat, swaggering among backup musicians who wear Nazi-like uniforms and, eventually, firing a machine gun at undesirables.
The music of “The Wall” is held together by variations on the rising and falling refrain of “Another Brick in the Wall,” which can sound like a playground taunt or a funeral march. But the album also holds some of the most chameleonic music Mr. Waters ever wrote. Pink Floyd’s distinctive slow, plangent anthems — like “Comfortably Numb” — are a big part of “The Wall.” But other songs reach back to doo-wop and Beatles-like vocal harmonies, boogie like 1970s blues-rock, role-play like orchestral show tunes (in the climactic song “The Trial”), pulsate like disco or, in the final song, strum along like skiffle.
Like other operas in repertory, as “The Wall” has become, it is a fixed work. Onstage, it diverges from the album only as much as it needs to in order to suit a concert setting — that is, with no fade-outs, and using newer sound bites for the moments when Mr. Floyd is watching TV. Robbie Wyckoff, on vocals, Dave Kilminster, on lead guitar, and G.E. Smith, on guitar, emulated Mr. Gilmour’s old parts nearly note for note, and it sounded like some arrangements from the album were mixed with the live performance. But Mr. Waters was generally live, groaning and cackling through his confessions and threats, playing the troubled introvert and then making himself the rock star in the spotlight.
Back in 1979 “The Wall” was a rock star’s abreaction to success, but Mr. Waters was also worrying about how media overload could distract and neutralize potential protest. Now, at 68, Mr. Waters has made “The Wall” far less about himself and more about his anger at abuses of power. Yet with amplification, staging, hit melodies and his celebrity status, he got the Yankee Stadium audience following his orders, submitting to his power. For the moment, all paradoxes were subsumed in the spectacle.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 10, 2012
A music review on Monday about Roger Waters’s production of “The Wall,” at Yankee Stadium, misidentified the singer who performed the vocal parts sung by David Gilmour on the Pink Floyd album “The Wall.” He is Robbie Wyckoff — not Dave Kilminster who, as the review noted, plays lead guitar in the live production.
Photo by Chad Batka for The New York Times
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