When rock music hit the US it was a relatively new thing to a majority of people. It was something fresh that got people excited in a new sound. In the late sixties and early seventies another new art form materialized. This time it was not a new style of music, it was a way to express it. The addition of videos that were made to correlate with artists" songs changed the level of expression that musicians had. Many artists made short videos to go along with single tracks and some made films to go along with whole albums such as the Beatle's "Yellow Submarine," and Led Zeppelin's "The Song Remains the Same." This paper is about one group, Pink Floyd, and the video that accompanies their album of the same name, "The Wall.".
Pink Floyd was an English band formed in the early sixties by Syd Barret, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright. Early on in their career Pink Floyd established themselves as a psychedelic band and received a fair amount of success for their first works. Their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was highly successful and landed them the job of opening for Jimi Hendrix in 1967. (www.keno.org) It was on this tour that Pink Floyd's lead singer/guitarist/composer Syd Barret began his downward spiral that ended his career. Roger Waters old friend David Gilmore joined on to replace the fallen Barret and that was Pink Floyd's lineup until the 1980s. It was during this period that the band made their most popular albums which were also the most commercially successful. In 1979 the band released their second best selling album The Wall. Two years later Alan Parker began work on a film taken from Roger Water's screenplay that was based on the album The Wall. (www.pinkfloydhyperbase.com) .
The film "The Wall" consists of songs from the album of the same name in a rearranged fashion and one new song, When the Tigers Broke Free parts 1 & 2. (album tracks "Hey You," and "The Show Must Go On," were not featured in the movie.