In February 1980, aged fifteen, I found myself at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island watching a spectacular performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I didn’t even know the band. I had to be talked into going by my friend Richie, who had scalped tickets for $75 each, which was an enormous sum for a teenager at the time. I received a brisk education in the venue parking lot, where a stranger we met played us his old Pink Floyd tapes and told us the story of Syd Barrett, the band’s founder whose mental breakdown had inspired The Wall. Later, I would learn that the album was as much about Roger Waters, who was then the band’s frontman, but it hardly mattered. I was hooked.
Over 26 tracks, The Wall tells the story of a musician named Pink, a sensitive young man mocked at school by his teachers, traumatised by an overbearing mother, used by the establishment, and let down by his lovers. It was not my story, but the alienated rage, the haunted isolation, and the flight into the imagination all struck a chord in me. Over the next few years, I’d wallpaper my bedroom with Pink Floyd posters and work my way through their entire back-catalogue, from Animals through Wish You Were Here to the comically strange Ummagumma and their debut LP Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was the band’s only record with Syd Barrett.
Forty-four years later, I’m a different man. Today, I’m a husband and a father, I’m an observant Jew not a Christian, I’m married to an Israeli, and I have developed deep attachments to Judaism and Israel, a country about which I knew next to nothing when I was fifteen. I like to believe that Roger Waters today is also a very different man from the one who authored the soundtrack of my adolescence. This week, Waters appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored and flatly denied that Hamas had raped Israeli women on 7 October. Those who claim otherwise, he told his host, are spreading “filthy, disgusting lies.”
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Reb Thomas, I think we need to address a far more important ethical question:
Is it still OK to love the Original Trilogy knowing that it was made by the same no-talent clown who would go on to make the Prequels and then sell his soul to Disney?
I almost didn't finish your piece, when you said these words to introduce your opinion: "And how should we think about it?" It's a common new phase, to preface an article with the question-- how should we think? As if you are going to tell us how. But it's all wrong. We don't need to be told.
This said, I'm glad I did read it through. I'm an artist and also a Jew. It's interesting but also tricky to think where art begins, at what point we transcend into that holy state, and at what level of doing/making one qualifies for these transcendent qualities.
It's also hard to decide the truth about Roger's antisemitism, because of his slippery denials.
I once bought a house, next door to a lovely Catholic couple. When they found out I was Jewish, each made antisemitic remarks to me. Seemingly innocuous but truly hateful remarks, made separately, but coming from one united ugly mind. After that, I couldn't look at them. They weren't artists. Well maybe they were. He liked to build things. She liked to dance. In the back yard with her children. Joyfully in an artful, higher consciousness-type state. But I still had to sell the house and move.