Another Brick in The Wall

In a recent road trip I took this summer, one of the prime spots we stopped at was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. One of the most powerful exhibits I saw was the exhibit on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Taking into account my bias as a huge Pink Floyd fan, the exhibit was exceptional, containing a huge segment of the actual wall used on the tour as well as other props (like the blow up model of the teacher we see in the youtube clip). Written on the wall was a quote by Roger Waters that really helped me gain better perspective on his motivation for the writing of The Wall as well as, after considering it in terms of Adorno, the concept of mass media and culture industry as a whole.
After some internet search, I seem to be unable to find the exact quote, but the idea of it as I remember is this: Pink Floyd was playing a show in Montreal during a tour for the album Animals (the two previous albums released by Pink Floyd at this time were Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, so Pink Floyd was at possibly the height of their popularity in terms of popular culture/mass attendance at shows. Before this tour, the band and fans had the unique opportunity of being able to perform/ listen to Dark Side and other great Floyd works in intimate settings with minimal to no disconnection between band and audience. At the Montreal show, with Pink Floyd playing to mainly the popular culture consumers in huge arenas, Roger Waters told of never feeling more distant from an audience before. During one song he noticed a fan trying to climb the net that separated the “demi-gods” of the band from the mindless worshippers in the audience. Without thinking, Waters spit in this person’s face. After the show Waters had never felt so horrible, and he immediately began work on The Wall. He described his mission/motivation by saying that he could either remain “comfortably numb” to the position he now held in the realm of popular culture or use it to the extent that so many others have failed to do.
Here arrives the question of the possibility of revolution through mass mediated art. Waters’ and Pink Floyd’s art pre-The Wall clearly lost its intended meaning through its mediation into popular culture. But with Waters’ new-found realization of his place among “the masses” I think the idea of revolution he intended to portray through The Wall could possibly be more successful than a revolution attempted through mass mediated art without this self-realization.
Just to note some of the more obvious “revolutionary” points in Another Brick in the Wall, the teacher in The Wall reproaches the student for poetry, and otherwise not institutionalized thinking, but then as we see in the next scene, his lashing out at the students is really more emotionally driven by his frustration with his wife and her own domination over him. Possibly this could be a commentary on who is controlling the media/education/environment as a whole and what are their true motivations in terms of representation or even just what is and what is not mediated to the masses.
Also, through institutionalized education, the “machine” of the factory in the scene that the students are run though leaves them as the mangled, identical children marching identically to their places in society, reflected in Adorno’s essay when he comments on the muted forms of individuals we see in films and in characters, generic enough to relate to everyone, but still every individual is too specific to actually be one of the characters in the movie.
In terms of popular culture and mass media, we all have one of several options. We can either be mindless followers, eventually turned into mince meat by the presses of the institutions, we can recognize the issues and dream about revolution as does the main character in Another Brick in the Wall, or we can use mass media against itself in an attempt to change perception, as Roger Waters did with The Wall.