The first time I really got a glimpse of what kind of person my dad really is was when I was twelve years old. He pulled me aside from whatever I was doing to sit down in front of a speaker in our living room and listen to something. I heard one twenty-minute-long note and looked at him questioningly. He looked back at me with magic in his eyes and a passion, the likes of which I had never before seen.

“I remember when I was your age and I first heard this. I was just sitting in my friend‰’s basement and just thinking how amazing this was, how I had never heard anything like it before,‰” he said.

I just nodded my head and smiled convincingly, my mind elsewhere thinking of every episode of That 70‰’s Show I had ever seen.

That night my dad did something for which I‰’m not sure I could ever forgive him. He went on Amazon and ordered Pink Floyd‰’s The Wall and decided it was time for me to watch it.

The album The Wall, was first released in 1979. On first listen it sounds like a concept album dealing with war and it‰’s effects on the singer, and it does have some very poignant anti-war songs, “Mother‰” being one that sticks with me in particular. The 1982 film had a much different effect on me. The film was very clearly a rock opera about a troubled rock star named Pink. It was surreal, horrific, and disturbing. As an 11 year old girl who was too afraid to read Goosebumps books it really was a wakeup call to the messed up world that we live in, or more specifically the messed up world that Pink lives in. The graphic scenes of Pink being eaten alive from the inside by worms and rampant Nazi imagery stuck with me to this very day and probably helped shape who I am as a person. I really didn‰’t forgive him and neither did my mom.

Looking back on it, though, I can‰’t help but think, why don‰’t albums like that become popular anymore? The Wall was visceral and raw. It wasn‰’t afraid to say things that absolutely positively no one wanted to hear. It was a bleak outlook on life that can make even me, the biggest goth this side of gothville think “Damn, that‰’s depressing.” There are people out there, though, who I‰’m sure could listen to The Wall and think “Damn, this guy gets it.”

I‰’ve always had a belief that part of music and art, in general, is just shouting the way one feels and the way one is into the void on the off chance that someone else who is the same way will hear it and know that they aren‰’t alone. It‰’s for this reason that I think, despite the fact The Wall literally scarred me for life, we should encourage music with this kind of cutting and abrasive honesty. Trigger warnings might be advisable.