Pink Floyd fans believe the band’s album, The Wall, is intended to be an “endless loop” because of the final words on the last song.
Roger Waters penned the seminal piece, which was released in 1979 and has come to define Pink Floyd. The well-received album is delighting fans decades on from its initial release as listeners try and figure out whether the album was intended as a continuous loop. A post to the r/TodayILearned subreddit saw listeners try and figure out what the intention of the final song was, with some believing Outside the Wall has a clear and direct link to the opening song, In the Flesh?. The post reads: “Pink Floyd’s The Wall is implied to be an endless loop.
“The final song, Outside the Wall, ends with the words ‘Isn’t this where…’, and the album begins with the words ‘…we came in?’ with a continuation of the melody of the last song, hinting at the cyclical nature of Water’s theme.” Listeners were thrilled once they made this realisation and noted the “very bleak message” found within The Wall.
One fan of the album praised it as “much more food forr thought than your average rock album” and highlighted little details such as the end of Outside the Wall as a reason for this love. They wrote: “It leaves a very bleak message if you think about it. The album talks about a person who slowly drifts away from all his personal relationships in life until he hits a point where he just decides to completely isolate himself.
“This isolation eats him from the inside and twists his mind. In a violent outburst amidst the confusion, he harshly judges himself and his past actions and relationships, and decides to break the wall and open himself to life once more… only for the cycle to start again from the beginning.
“It also heavily implies in the last song that life is just a mish-mash of people going through this process, either alone or in company, through its ups and downs.” Another user agreed, adding: “I used to dislike this album because of the immense feeling of hopelessness it brought with it.
“Reading the top level comment and down to this one really made me see that maybe he wanted out of The Wall after the Trial. I always saw it as sentenced to live in the life you create and the barriers you put up.”
A third listener suggested the purpose of The Wall is the continually break down the walls put up. They wrote: “I love how the looping of the album also changes the context of the concept album. Breaking down the wall, only to rebuild and it break it down again ad infinitum.”
It’s a theory which has been agreed with by many, though others were focused more on the actual act of looping a song this well in the late ’70s. They wrote: “What blows my mind is that they recorded it this way, knowing that few people would actually have the capability to experience the loop.
“Since you’d have to flip the LP over, you’d never really get to experience the album loop unless you had two turntables set up. Definition of ambitious.” Another pointed out this is not the first Pink Floyd album to hint at a continuous loop.
One listener wrote: “The Dark Side of the Moon is another album that does this, with a heartbeat heard at both the beginning of Speak to Me and the end of Eclipse.”
