In 1983, I was just beginning to comprehend the political realities of the world in the ugly, mean, violent Reagan years, only just beginning to get a sense of the fact that the Big Brothers and Sisters of the world were not necessarily to be trusted, believed or venerated. As with most teenage boys, I was struggling to figure out what the hell life was, and few if any of the answers I was being given via church, school, whatever resonated with me at all.
Into that void landed
The Final Cut, Roger Waters' last Pink Floyd album. A quiet, introspective album, the Final Cut spoke to me on levels that no music, certainly no previous Pink Floyd music, ever had. It whispered in my ear and affirmed the fact that all those ugly, depressing things that seemed to be happening in the world were, in fact, happening; it was not depressing to listen to, it was affirming -- here was a rational voice, an adult voice, really, saying, yup, it really is as bad as all that. And it could get worse.
The Final Cut is essentially a coda to
The Wall, without the bombast and excess of Waters' masterpiece. It is a requiem for the post war dream -- that thought that after WWII everything would be better and rosier and happier (see Donald Fagen's
Nightfly) but that actually turned meaner and darker. Waters watched England under Maggie Thatcher degenerate into violence and misrule, and realized that all the things that were supposed to happen, didnt.
In this day of CD's, this is a hard thing to understand: FC is a two-part album, and each side of the vinyl tells a different side of the story. Side One is the personal side, the story (I have always felt) of the sadistic schoolmaster in the Wall. This may be in part because the protagonist of the videos made for FC was the same actor as played the schoolmaster in the movie. In any event, I imagined this man, sitting home, retired, watching the chaos of England degenerating around him and wondering what the hell he and his generation fought for: his marriage empty ("Your Possible Pasts"), his students insolent and whiny ("The Hero's Return"), his memories of dead comrades fresh in his mind (the absolutely brilliant and heart wrenchin
g "The Gunners Dream"), and the only place he can get relief is down at the pub, where he can't truly be himself, and realizes that his life is half over and nothing is what he expected ("Paranoid Eyes"). It all sounds harsh, but the harshness is belied by Waters' empathy for his characters. While he doesnt see much hope for him, he does genuinely feel for him. There is no arch sneering here.
Side Two takes the story to 30,000 feet, as it were, and shows the broader world that Waters sees on the news -- this in the days when there was no CNN Europe. He literally kicks it off with a bang -- the missile explosion at the beginning of "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" -- and leads into a scathing and slightly homicidal plan for the "overgrown infants" currently running the world (or at least they were in 1983):
...welcome Reagan and Haig
Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley,
Mr. Brezhnev and party
the ghost of McCarthy
and the memories of Nixon... ("The Fletcher Memorial Home")
Next, a meditation on the fact that the war to end all wars - the second one - hasn't ended war at all, and soldiers continue to leave "Southampton Dock" again and again to die in bloody battlefields.
Following this is the title track, and the heart of the album, which distinctly ties this record into the Wall -- in fact "The Final Cut" is almost a summary of the Wall, a very succinct tale of a rock star isolated and suicidal, cut off from family and from himself, hateful of life but without courage to make the 'final cut' that would end that existence. In other words, the world is ugly, dark, and mean, but it is what we have, it is our life, and as with Hamlet, the fear of what might lie beyond keeps us from making our quietus, as twere. This is singly one of the most powerful songs I have ever heard, lyrically and musically, and if only one track were to survive for posterity this would be it.
After this long, subdued album, Waters seems to remember Pink Floyd is a band (one wonders why Gilmour and Mason even signed on, they are so artistically absent -- praps the payday was significant) and blasts into the vitriolic, slightly profane, hilarious rocker "Not Now John", a wicked satire of the corporate world in general, the arrogance and boorishness in general of the English-speaking world, and by extension the arrogance of Margaret Thatcher's government, which dispatched an army to go to war with Argentina over some tiny, almost lifeless islands, just to show that England still had some balls left.
We showed Argentina
And now we'll show these
Make us feel tough
And wouldnt Maggie be pleased?
Finally, with no stone unturned, Waters starts a nuclear war to show where he feels all this will end up, and does so in "Two Suns In The Sunset". If we dont get off this track, he says, if we dont change our way of looking at the world and dealing with each other, in the end all the bottled up rage will explode in nuclear fire. It is sobering, frightening, and poetic.
So why did I like this album so much as a teen? Well, first of all, I agreed with it, with its emotion, with its suppositions about the way the world was made. The critique of Thatcher's Britain was not far removed from the truth of Reagan's America. To be honest, it probably appealed to my adolescent sense of angst; now, 23 years later, I relate more to the relational aspects, the isolation and difficulty of life and the pain that people can cause you. It is one of those few albums that continue to resonate in new ways every time I hear it, on so many levels, like Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks." If you have not heard it, I strongly recommend you check it out, dig out your headphones, and listen in the dark. It will impact you deeply, even though some of the references are dated.
It sounds a lot like today. Peace.
