The Final Cut Hear it Now
1997
The Final Cut began as a modest expansion upon the soundtrack of the film version of The Wall, with a few new songs added and its release scheduled for the latter half of 1982. In the interim, however, the movie, a grotesquely misconceived collaboration between Waters and director Alan Parker, was released to a general thud of incomprehension. Around the same time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, irked by the unseemly antics of an Argentine despot, dispatched British troops halfway around the world to fight and die for the Falkland Islands.
That event, coming in the wake of his failed film statement, apparently stirred Waters to an artistic epiphany. Out of the jumbled obsessions of the original Wall album, he fastened on one primal and unifying obsession: the death of his father in the battle of Anzio in 1944. Thus, on The Final Cut, a child's inability to accept the loss of the father he never knew has become the grown man's refusal to accept the death politics that decimate each succeeding generation and threaten ever more clearly with each passing year to ultimately extinguish us all.
The album is dedicated to the memory of the long-lost Eric Fletcher Waters, and in one of its most memorable moments, his now-middle-aged son bitterly envisions a "Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants and kings," one and all welcome, be they pompous butchers in comic-opera uniforms or smug statesmen in expensive suits. He presents a ghastly processional: "... please welcome Reagan and Haig/Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley/Mr. Brezhnev and party.... And," he coos, "now adding color, a group of anonymous Latin American meat packing glitterati." With these "colonial wasters of life and limb" duly assembled, Waters inquires, with ominous delicacy: "Is everyone in?/Are you having a nice time?/Now the final solution can be applied."
As fantasy, this has a certain primordial appeal. But Waters realizes that all the Neanderthals will never be blown away. What concerns him more is the inexplicable extent of fighting in the world when there seems so little left to defend. In "The Gunners Dream," a dying airman hopes to the end that his death will be in the service of "the postwar dream," for which the album stands as a requiemthe hope for a society that offers "a place to stay/enough to eat," where "no one ever disappears ... and maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control." But Waters, looking around him more than thirty-five years after the war's end, can only ask: "Is it for this that daddy died?"
In the past, Waters might have dismissed the gunner's dream as an empty illusion from the outset. Instead, though, Waters insists on honoring his sacrifice: "We cannot just write off his final scene/Take heed of his dream/Take heed." Without a commitment to some objective values, he seems to say, we sink into a brutalizing xenophobia an "I'm all right, Jack" condition explored with considerable brilliance in the withering "Not Now John." In that song, the deepest human truths are cast aside in a frenzy "to compete with the wily Japanese": "There's too many home fires burning/And not enough trees/So fuck all that/We've got to get on with these."
With a Sixties-style soul-chick chorus bleating "Fuck all that!" in the background, and guitarist David Gilmour pile-driving power chords throughout, "Not Now John" qualifies as one of the most ferocious performances Pink Floyd has ever put on record. In the context of The Final Cut, it is something of an oddity; for while the music has an innate architectural power that pulls one ever deeper into the album's conceptual design, the performances and production are generally distinguished by their restrainteven the fabled Floydian sound effects are reduced to the occasional ticking clock or whooshing bomber. Attention is mostly devoted to the music's human textures: the gorgeous saxophone solos of Raphael Ravenscroft, Ray Cooper's thundering percussion, shimmering string washes, the sometimes gospel-tinged piano of Michael Kamen (who coproduced the album with Waters and James Guthrie) and, on every track, the most passionate and detailed singing that Waters has ever done.
Whether this will be their last album as a group (the official word is no, but Wright is apparently gone for good, and even the faithful Nick Mason relinquishes his drum chair on one cut to session player Andy Newmark) is not as compelling a question as where Waters will go with what appears to be a new-found freedom. He plans to record a solo album for his next project, and one hopes that just the novelty of becoming a full-fledged human will be enough to keep him profitably occupied for many years to come.
(Posted: Apr 14, 1983)
Advertisement
News and Reviews
Click "Copy Me" to add the RS.com Widget to your Facebook page, blog, MySpace page and more.
Advertisement
Click the play button.
Register or enter your username and password.
Let the music play!
It's FREE.
- The Post War Dream
- Your Possible Pasts
- One Of The Few
- The Hero's Return
- The Gunner's Dream
- Paranoid Eyes
- Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert
- The Fletcher Memorial Home
- Southampton Dock
- The Final Cut
- Not Now John
- Two Suns In The Sunset
Your Turn
Review 1 of 2
Mati writes:
I can pretty much say that there ain't any bad pink Floyd album.But even though I admire Roger Waters as the real mentor and resident genius of Floyd (in other words the Bryan Wilson of Floyd), sometimes the argument (or the concept) is over the music, the art.this is what happens on "The final cut".But it still isn't even close to bad.There are very emotional moments and is a really deep and brave record.There are really few musical works that can pull out self feelings to whose listener may be.And that's something definitely valuable.
Oct 5, 2007 07:45:45
Review 2 of 2
catlic writes:
Too much Waters leads to a lesser quality. A little more Gilmour singing and more of his signature guitar sound (which is the Pink Floyd sound) would have balanced out the lesser material. Having said that the lyrics are brilliant and very keenly focused. As for the theme of the album, 23 years later nothing has changed in the world, the conflicts are relocated and we have newer, but just as stupid,leaders
Jul 25, 2006 14:26:14
Previous Next
Advertisement
More CD Reviews
-
Coldplay
Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends -
Lil' Wayne
Tha Carter III -
Wolf Parade
At Mount Zoomer -
Motley Crue
Saints Of Los Angeles -
The Virgins
The Virgins -
Dr. John
City That Care Forgot -
Katy Perry
One Of The Boys -
Martha Wainwright
I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too -
Adele
19 -
Jakob Dylan
Seeing Things