Here's my arguments of which one is better. Obviously you can't argue taste, but leaving out taste here's what I got.
In case anyone accuses me of plagiarizing, I posted this on another site although I changed things. http://www.debate.org/debates/Pink-Floy ... e-Moon./1/

One reason why "The Wall" is such a master piece is because the whole album is a story. But not only is it a story, Roger Waters, who was the main force behind creating the album, also created a movie to go along with it. The album/movie is about a rock star called Pink and his mental break down latter in life. He lost his father in world war two as a child. He was left behind with his mother who was both loving and over protective.(From the song "Mother") Latter in life he gets a divorce with his wife. Much of the movie is about his mental breakdown and often shows him in a state of disillusion and detachment from the world. At one point of the movie he goes into a wild frenzy (From the song "One of my Turns") while he has a lover in his room. He throws vases, breaks mirrors, hurls objects at the girl a few times, and throws his TV out of his high story window onto the busy street bellow.

"The Wall" was inspired from Waters own mental breakdown. Thus "Pink" in the story was partly based off of Waters himself. Waters also, most probably, got some ideas from former "Pink Floyd" leader Syd Barret who had his own mental break down caused from drugs.

I found the movie very different to anything I have experienced. It was undoubtedly a worthwhile experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't say that everyone would like it though, because of it's dark mood. But that is only taste, it does not detract from the fact that this was a master piece.

The total length of the movie is about one hour and thirty five minutes.

There are very few albums I'm sure that have a movie to go along with it! This argument supports the fact that "The Wall" is more creative than "DSOTM".

Just to make it clear I'm not saying it was entirely Roger Waters who created the movie. It was written by Waters and directed by Alan Parker. David Gilmour also did some writing of his own, but it was mainly Waters.

The Wall gives listeners an incite into the band. Roger Waters wrote The Wall based partly off of his own life. Thus fans can relate to this album, because it is a story based off a member of one of their favorite (if not favorite) bands.

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"The wall" is 1.3 hours long according to my iTunes account. DSOTM only has about 42 minutes. Sorry that last part might be a little bit off, somehow "money" got deleted from my iTunes account, so I had to add how long Amazon said the song was to 36 minutes making it 42. But if there is any difference at all it is small I am sure. [3]



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The wall has a total of 26 songs.[3] Dark side has less than half, with only 10 songs.


This is one factor to why The wall is a more creative and imaginative album than DSOTM.

Here are two scenarios:

Someone buys DSOTM, puts it in his CD player listens to the whole thing (10 songs), and says wow that was a great album I'll listen to that again sometime. In contrast someone goes and buys The Wall, listens to the first 10 songs and says wow this album is great, and to think I'm not even half way finished! I'm really looking forward to listening to the rest. Latter he listens to the next ten songs and he still isn't even finished. Next time he listens to the last 6 songs. All in all he listens to the whole thing in 3 sittings.

I really don't know why it makes it more superior to be able to listen to the whole thing in one sitting instead of listening to the whole thing in three sittings.



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The wall is obviously lyrically superior when you compare the amount of lyrics put into "The Wall" as apposed to "DSOTM". Before I go on, let me make clear the figures are probably not exact. I copy and pasted the lyrics from each individual song from the websites referenced, making sure not to count the song title and some of the none lyrical parts, onto Microsoft word. I used the word count tool to come up with my figures. So these numbers are probably not exact but if there is any difference it is minor.

Ok, so here it is "DSOTM" has a total of 1,167 words, "The Wall" has a total of 3,153 words.[6] That is more than twice the amount of words, not far from three times the amount. This factor added with the fact that the whole album is a story, makes "The Wall" lyrically superior.


Further defense of my last three points:

The quality over quantity argument would be the most obvious refutation of my last three points so I will address it.

The Wall and DSOTM are extremely popular and creative albums. Almost everyone would include at least one of these albums as one of their top five PF albums. The reason why I'm saying this is because I think this shows that both of these albums are made up of quality songs. Quality lyrics. And quality music. You can't dismiss the amount of time the album makes up simply by saying quality over quantity, because almost every Pink Floyd fan would say both albums are quality albums.

Roger Waters is one of the greatest lyrical writers in the history of music. Therefore we can conclude that his lyrics in The Wall are not bellow average lyrics. And thus the amount of lyrics written for The Wall is still a strong point.





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Let's look what shows up when you type pink floyd into the You tube search bar on the home page.
The * represents that it's from "The Wall". The ~ represents that it's from "Dark Side".

Wish You were here
Comfortably Numb *
Another Brick in the wall *
the wall *
hey you *
time ~
money ~
dark side of the moon ~
shine on you crazy diamond
mother *

You tube is one of the most common sources that people use in means of looking for music. Five of the most searched PF related things are from "The Wall" while three are from dark side. As you can see four out of five of the most searched are from "The Wall" while it takes up until the sixth most searched thing for it to have a dark side song.



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Now lets take a look at how many songs achieved more than one million views on You tube.


Songs that achieved more than 1mill views from "Dark side of the moon":

1.Time
2.Brain Damage
3. Money


Songs that achieved more than 1mill views from "The Wall":

1. Another Brick in the wall
2. Mother
3. Goodbye Blue Sky
4. Empty Spaces
5. Hey You
6. Comfortably Numb
7. Run Like Hell
8. Waiting for the Worms
9. The Trial

10. Outside the Wall. (This one is questionable because the original is less than two minutes long but this was taken from the movie and is over four minutes long).



"Goodbye cruel world/is there anybody out there" also got really close with more than 930,000 views.


This is three times the amount of songs (if you exclude outside the wall). This I think supports the fact that "The Wall" simply has more popular songs or more of pink floyds "classics".

Popular though does not mean better necessarily, but because there are so many more songs that are liked from the Wall we can reasonably conclude that The Wall simply has better songs.


I'd also like to add The Wall has allot more guitar solos thrown in.

its not easy to compare Floyd albums to each other. Pink Floyd is the first band i remember hearing as a kid and i was hooked immediately, Gilmour is and always will be my favorite and why i started playing. The Wall being the first Album i ever owned. In defense of DSOTM i would have to say that to some degree, there are things about it that hold more weight than the latter. For instance, the political landscape of the band. In 1973, though they were very much a successful act prior to by any standard, I don't think even they had the notion of how huge a success that was going to be. It deals with theme's that every man or woman can relate to, and that is the everyday stress of time, death and money. They also were more of a band at that time IMO. Who doesn't love Roger Waters, but you can't deny that Rick Wright probably wasn't feeling the same love as he was feeling in 73', you can probably say the same for Gilmour. They are two completely different albums which is why i Love Floyd.

Also one of the reasons Animals remains one of my favorite Floyd albums, I feel like it has what I LOVE about DOTSM and The Wall and puts those hands together.

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YMMV

Chont's Mustang Presets

After reading the nice writeup you did, I almost hate to say this. I never got The Wall. It always felt like Waters trying to outdo himself. I always thought that the hype was bigger than the product. I consider DSOTM to be one of the best recorded and produced rock albums of all time. I saw Pink Floyd in '68 at a college auditorium. I've been a fan for a long time.

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With all due respect and I mean absolutely no disrespect but DSOTM was on the charts for longer than any rock record in history, (my guess as I don't remember the actual number of years), and out sold all other PF albums, (a guess again) so in the words of whatever his name is "money talks and bs writes very long posts about favorite albums", just kidding welcome to the Forum bassplayer++

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

Both kick $@!. No debating that.

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1984 Squier Contemporary Stratocaster
1986 Peavey Envoy 110
1967 Kingston Acoustic

I liked Animals the most

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Number of songs, number of minutes of music, number of words of lyrics, number of You-Tube hits, etc. etc. Except for the movie thing your argument seems based on mathematics. You began this thread with the statement that this is why it's "better" and then went on to specify in detail how it's really "more popular" and "bigger". Then you said you wanted to talk about quality and ended up turning it around and talking about quantity again.

As a consumate Floyd fan you'll get no argument from me that The Wall is an amazing feat of music making but to say that it is "better" than Dark Side will require more than just a bunch of numbers for me to go along with it.

In my mind they are equally good. Both masterpieces. Actually, Dark Side must be given extra credit for having been done at a time when they had less experience at that kind of work. By the time The Wall came out it's only natural you should have expected more from them and yet this is not the first time I have seen this debate so they are obviously still ranked fairly close in the minds of many.


Other interesting and semi related tidbits:

Other bands have also done concept albums so the mighty Floyd are not entirely unique in that respect. Moody Blues - Days of Future Past, Yes - Tales From Topographic Oceans, even the almost disco-ish Styx album, Paradise Theater was a concept album.

At least one other band has also done a movie as well. The Who's Tommy springs to mind.

One of my favs as well.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I dunno, I think a bear would beat a shark in a fight.

I'm just throwing this out there, but I prefer the final cut to the wall.

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Rated "M" for meaty.

The Dark Side of the Moon was an immediate success, topping the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart for one week. It subsequently remained in the charts for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988, longer than any other album in history. With an estimated 45 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide. It has twice been remastered and re-released, and has been covered in its entirety by several other acts. It spawned two singles, "Money" and "Us and Them". In addition to its commercial success, The Dark Side of the Moon is one of Pink Floyd's most popular albums among fans and critics, and is frequently ranked as one of the greatest rock albums of all time.

Need I say more. Actually I pasted this off the internet after typing the basic same thing up and then not having it post. Also if you check just about any album rating out there it will tell you the same thing.

Just my take on it.

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Hello bassplayer++. As you say, there's little point arguing taste, but I'm pretty confident the quality of an album has nothing to do with how many minutes it plays for, let alone how many words it contains. If that was all that mattered we'd set Proust to music and never listen to anything else ever again.

(Actually, if it was Proust we wouldn't have time to listen to anything else ever again.)

And I don't think how many hits a track gets on Youtube tells us much of importance either. You might as well argue that DSOTM is the best because it has sold far more millions of albums - and I notice you don't follow that line of reasoning.

In my completely subjective view it comes down to this. The Wall is a sickeningly solipsistic, overly grandiose and deeply alienated ego maniacal exhibition by a pop star who at that point had lost touch with his audience and all but lost touch with reality; far, far gone in the worst of the narcissism of his time. It is the bloated '70s vanity project par excellence and stands for everything that punk and the new wave had to come along to sweep away. (Tiresome though they often were too.)

Though it does have a couple of nice numbers and some good guitar playing.

However, DSOTM has more nice numbers and also some very archetypal guitar work as well as some fine female backing vocals, and it was a whole heck of a lot more fun to see done live on stage, back in the day. It is also fairly overblown, but just the right side of that line which was crossed so horribly far by The Wall.

Also, The Wall movie is utterly ghastly and the drawings of Gerald Scarfe are loathesome and lacking in any colour sense; much as he's a nice fellow with a very charming wife.

So my vote is for DSOTM. By a country mile.

YMMV. And clearly does.

Now. Is this the point where I get banned from the Forum?

Cheers - C

PS: Meddle was best.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I also found this little tidbit.

Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ Still Sells Over 10,000 Copies Each Week
by: Joe Robinson September 26, 2011

Capitol Records
Most bands would kill to sell 10,000 copies of an album in its first week of release, but Pink Floyd‘s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ still manages to move that many units each and every week — 38 years after it first was released. And that 10,000 is in a slow week.

And for the record I do also enjoy The Wall but ya can't argue with the numbers.

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+1

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

"In my completely subjective view it comes down to this. The Wall is a sickeningly solipsistic, overly grandiose and deeply alienated ego maniacal exhibition by a pop star who at that point had lost touch with his audience and all but lost touch with reality; far, far gone in the worst of the narcissism of his time. It is the bloated '70s vanity project par excellence and stands for everything that punk and the new wave had to come along to sweep away. (Tiresome though they often were too.)

Though it does have a couple of nice numbers and some good guitar playing."

Thank you Ceri. I got a good chuckle reading that.

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'10 American Deluxe HSS Sunset Metallic
'10 JA-90 Thinline Telecaster
'15 Music Man JP-15 Blueberry Burst
'07 Les Paul Standard Faded LCPG #82
'14 Carvin ST300
'12 Carvin CS424S
'66 Guild Starfire IV w/Bigsby
'14 Warmouth Partscaster Daphne Blue

The wall wins hands down in my op, in every direction, better guitar playing, great concepts and the whole vibe is just better.

Also, hate to say this in case some disagree, but Floyd were never the same after Waters left. A totally different animal after that and i think they sorely missed Roger's great songwriting and visions of alienation and isolation.

So it's The Wall for me.

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Luck won't do it and ignorance can't

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