GOOD KID MAAD CITY AND THE WALL

Each of these pieces is an album with a narrative so concise that it seems more appropriate to refer to them as novels rather than albums. However, the unique mastery of each, does not reside in its linear telling of events. Instead the story is told through a series of richly textured chapters that each describe the mood and emotional content of some of life’s experiences.

One chapter describes the feeling of driving aimlessly, freestyling with friends but also concealing insecurities. Another describes the feeling of being a child, constantly humiliated in a British school. The two albums even share a thematically similar chapter, Swimming Pools and Comfortably Numb, which describe the sickly, sweet feeling of being drugged to escape difficulty.

The two pieces deal with very different subject matter. The Wall is concerned with the difficulty of one isolated, exceedingly privileged, individual and ultimately ends with his total destruction. Though certainly a successful masterpiece, The Wall is much more self indulgent in this way. Good Kid Maad City on the other hand deals with a more serious tragedy and yet it ends with an optimistic triumph, for its central characters as well as all the other “good kids” who are suffering in the “Maad City”.

A clear example of this contrast is illustrated in the way that the mother characters respond to the respective tragedies. Pink’s mother reappears at the end of the story to testify before the monstrous judge and her best attempt to defend Pink is to blubber and further humiliate him with her own desperate, hateful needs.

In contrast, the mother in Good Kid Maad city, having appeared throughout as a mild, somewhat comical character, steps forward after the tragedy and reveals herself to be arguably the most powerful force of love and trust in the album’s universe. She even gives an injunction to her son (and by proxy, to all of us) to harness the overwhelming energy generated by grief and violence and channel it toward bringing more beauty into the world.