What Does Pink Floyd Represent

Pink Floyd, the Wall : Mother
Analysis
Had Sigmund Freud lived 40 more years (to the overripe old age of 123), he would have been delighted to hear such a wonderful example of his life's psychoanlytic work embodied in the haunting lyrics of "Mother." Or had Oedipus lived a few millennium longer than his fictional death he would have found an adversary in the youthful Pink, a young boy whose desire for maternal acceptance and love is arguably equal to the greatest mother-centered protagonists in the history of literature. Contrary to the eye-gouging antics of Oedipus or even the grandiose melodrama later in Floyd's album, "Mother" is relatively low-key and emotionally subtle. The music itself is interestingly split, though with few if any
What's most interesting about the mother's voice is that it isn't so much a true-to-life recreation of her thoughts and sayings as it is a loose representation of her actions and what those actions are doing and have done to Pink. While the point of view is partly through the mother's eyes, there's a hint of something else behind her words, an omniscience that is beyond her or young Pink's view. It's as if the mother's actions rather than her thoughts and words are speaking, referring to herself in the third person ("she") rather than the first ("I"). No reasonably sane mother would knowingly hurt her own child yet millions of mother's in the world physically and psychologically harm their children through their actions. What one mother might think is best for her child could very well be the thing that causes the most detriment, as in the case of Pink. I personally don't think the mother is directly speaking but the effects of her actions certainly are. The problem with Pink's mother isn't that she is inherently evil or psychotic but rather that she is overprotective. As Waters said in a 1979 interview, "if you can level one accusation at mothers it is that they tend to protect their children too much. Too much and for too long. That's all." Having lost her husband to the war and seeing her son as the only remaining extension of the man she loved,
Being that the line is as ambiguous as the rest of the song's lyrics, there is much debate as to what "it" refers to. One theory is that Pink is looking over his childhood and reflecting on his mother's overprotection, wondering if she really had to set her expectations for him at such an overwhelming height. Another view is that "it" refers to Life in general as it has in previous songs. By this reading, Pink questions whether life really had to be so hard and whether pleasure in life had to be so unattainable. But perhaps the most widely accepted reading has "it" referring to the Wall itself with Pink asking if his wall had to be so daunting, so unavoidable, and so insurmountable. Although everyone has a wall, Pink possibly victimizes himself by believing that his is greater and higher than the rest. As Raven so adequately put it in an e-mail: "'Mother, I know I needed a wall, but did it have to be so high that I can't get back out if I need to?'" As we will see later, there is a way out yet Pink is so full of self-pity and contempt for the world that he is blind to any means of