Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis | Hacker News Reader

Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis

thewallanalysis.com

99 pointslatentcall85 comments

I love Pink Floyd and The Wall, though I think it works better with visuals than a standalone album. It's a shame they were unhappy with their own footage of the few stage shows they performed of The Wall. My dad saw the New York show, for which I'll forever be jealous.

If you're a casual PF fan, I'd recommend two overlooked albums of the 70's - Meddle and Animals. Meddle is probably the first album to sound like what the public recognizes as Pink Floyd.

Animals is, to me, a masterpiece. Gilmour and Wright, especially, are amazing. It's dark and cynical, but maybe not as hopeless as The Wall. "Dogs" may be the best guitar work Gilmour has ever done, aside from "Comfortably Numb". Sadly, it seems like most of the band didn't like Waters controlling behavior and the dark turn his lyrics took on this album.

As a fan of Waters I would add The Final Cut to that list.

Final Cut could really be considered Waters' first solo album. One that the other members contributed to, so to speak.

Yes, very much agreed, and when you compare that to his works like Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking you see that being in the band really did bring out his best.

I am too kind to comment on Pink Floyd’s albums without Roger, though.

I was at a Brit Floyd concert (cover band super highly recommended) and during the few Division Bell songs everyone was running to use the bathroom so as to not miss the real Floyd music. :)

There are (dozens) of us who really like Division Bell, come on.

I thought that Momentary Lapse of Reason was okay: but that could be because it came out when I was a teen and apt to be uncritical about albums. I still enjoy it, but I can tell it’s a lesser work, now.

The rest don’t even hold my attention, though. Not even enough to dislike them.

It’s so interesting how people go either way on this. I’ve thought about it a bit (Pink Floyd are a bit of an obsession for me). I much prefer the Division Bell to the Final Cut. To the point where I find the Final Cut to be mostly boring, and many of Roger’s solo albums the same.

I think my brain is just way more into the music than the words. The melodies are what bring me to Pink Floyd. I think David’s guitar and Rick’s synth say more to me than Rog’s lyrics.

I also feel that without Rick the band loses its heart, and this shows mightily on the wall where his contributions were limited.

Yeah, I saw The Wall in college and once was enough for me.

I think your analysis of Waters is spot-on, as I've just introduced my teens to Dark Side (which they love) -- it's nice to have skipped it until my mid-50s, and now fully enjoy it and not be burned out on it.

And our daughter appreciates Animals as well. Thanks for the recommend on Meddle.

Animals is also one of my favourites.

Now, this may sound like blasphemy but I find Les Claypool's Frog Brigade's rendering of Animals even better than Pink Floyd's. Heavier, darker and incredibly visceral, whilst still being as faithful to the original as it could be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n4Cc7lX4NI&list=PLiEEpOHWcm...

> still being as faithful to the original as it could be

Wow, you weren't kidding - it's basically a note-for-note cover of the whole album. Thanks for sharing the link!

If we’re discussing Pink Floyd covers, I’d like to once again point people to Nightwish covering “High Hopes”.

No, it can’t replace the original - but taken on its own it’s frankly amazing.

> I'd recommend two overlooked albums of the 70's - Meddle and Animals.

I'd even throw Obscured by Clouds in there, which has some straight up rock jams as well as the more moody sound that became typical later.

>Obscured by Clouds

In their own way as an art band that's not-yet-popular-and-nobody-knows-if-they-ever-will-be, they were still following in the footsteps of the Beatles anyway with this early movie soundtrack. Too bad they weren't the stars of the movie.

There was also a movie called Zabriskie Point where they did some work on the soundtrack of that.

I really started listening to music as a teen because of the wall, but _obscured_ really hit me at an emotional level, years later, and has become one of my favorite albums. In particular “Childhood’s End” always gives me goosebumps / tears / a feeling of connectedness. (I would want that played as the last track for my funeral, if I were to have one, although I should probably require attendees have decent headphones!)

Did you ever watch La Vallée, the film Obscured By Clouds was commissioned to serve as the soundtrack for?

This is one I learned when the record first came out. Single-handedly as a teenager just banging on acoustic guitar.

Played it thousands of times, usually for myself to warm up.

Different every time, and still haven't sounded very much like Pink Floyd yet ;)

Still most people have never heard me do it ever.

There's not that many Floyd tunes that are so great without a band of some kind anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it ;)

I'm not an active musician or songwriter at all and when I do play for people intentionally it would usually be things that are more familiar.

But every now and then somebody will hand me a guitar or just say "play us something". They know it's going to be oldies :)

In the right situation as I accept I sometimes answer with the simple question; "Childhood's End?"

Without allowing enough time for a response then I just start banging. I already saw the look in their eye.

This is a tune that keeps giving and I'm trying to give them what it's giving you :)

Gilmour also played bass on Animals.

Did not know that! The pulsing baseline on Sheep is awesome. Not as awesome as the way the vocals tail off into hypnotic synth at the end of each line. It’s such a well crafted album.

Echoes, which is on Meddle, is one of my favourite tracks of all time. It's an incredible sonic journey through all kinds of territory, and I find myself rejuvenated after having listened to it.

This was the year that Roland became a guitar effects company but "nobody" knew it yet.

Of course Boss pedals wouldn't appear for years, but the Roland Space Echo was a little portable accessory tape echo effect that got them started in this direction and made it all possible.

I eventually got one and by the time it needed restoration in the 1990's the internet was already out and it only took a couple years before the electronic schematic showed up by pure luck one day.

I went over the whole thing in detail, I knew there were input impedance mismatches with many instruments from the way it acted, but it still sounded cool and people always loved it anyway.

But when it came to the tape itself, I just couldn't believe it. With all good components and ideal spec operation, there was no way to get the tape bias anywhere near what it was supposed to be for any known tape formulations. By a long shot. It still worked but just barely, and that's what everybody had been enjoying from the beginning, no different than they were when new. With major modification to the bias circuit, it's way better than new after that.

Turns out the high-tech Japanese electronics outfit built its first momentum toward becoming the biggest guitar effects company starting with a tape echo unit, when the engineering was so far off it could only be that nobody involved knew what they should have known about tape bias at all. One of the critical things that all studios and especially audio enginers kept up with since all they had was tape and it was everywhere.

Not sure I'd call Animals overlooked. It top-3's pretty much everyone's PF album rankings. Yes, DSOTM gets a lot of attention, but Animals is a well-recognized amazing album.

I think saying it's overlooked for "casual PF fans" is definitely true. Source: I'm a casual PF fan and have never listened to it.

I think with the “casual” qualifier it’s accurate. I used to listen to a couple of radio stations when commuting in the 90s and 2000s - DSOTM and The Wall were staples (the former even got a full album play when they were doing a weekend top album event) but I can’t ever recall hearing anything from Animals on a mainstream station.

I remain convinced that Anathema are big fans of "Animals" because if they didn't write "Pulled Under at 2000 Metres a Second"[1] immediately after listening to "Sheep", I'll be a monkey's uncle.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKFzGI8Fxq0

One of my advisors saw Pink Floyd play Dark Side in its entirety in London in the 70s. I can't help bringing it up every time I see him.

I "guess" it's possible to write more about it than there probably were total scraps of paper that Waters ever wrote the actual lyrics on :)

Well, PF was a psychedelic art band but they were right up there with the Beatles, Stones, and Who when it comes to studio ability, and I'm sure some promoters and record companies could tell that money could be made somehow.

They just didn't know how for a number of years.

The leading pop musicians at the time had gotten popular before they were the least bit associated with psychedelics, Floyd didn't have that. The machine was in place but they were not nearly on board yet.

Remember, LSD was still quite legal when these British musicians started recording. PF was kind of associated with that before they ever had a chance to get popular though.

Regardless, in the years leading up to the festivals of which Woodstock is the most well-known, PF toured the US a bit. About each year, with record company support. Festivals were not a thing yet at all, in fact there was only a very small fraction of the number of live concerts there are now. We had about one per month (we were lucky in my town even though it was not a big city) when I was a young teenager and it was always about the same 20,000 students and young adults at every one. Regardless of genre it was always fun.

I never could have gotten my parents to drop us off until after I had won free tickets by calling in to the radio station. On a land line there were so many callers trying to win, you would usually get a busy signal. Plus the Touch-Tone telephones were still just a dream, and the pulse dialing spinner had a governed return spring. It was pretty slow, so you could not make that many repeat attempts before someone else had won. Hacked into that and made it spin back as fast as the phone line would tolerate.

PF never got any serious airplay and most people had never heard of them until Dark Side came out in 1973. I had already seen them 5 times before that. Had a driver's license by then and took other kids. It was the female vocals and saxophone that finally put them on top after they had gone along with all kinds of record company plans. From that point on what had been laid-back art concerts turned into crowded pop music events.

Basically for five full years people told me I was crazy and nobody was ever going to significantly play Pink Floyd on the radio :\

PF had always gone without an opening act, playing the first set of previous material only, and coming back after a long break to perform the new stuff. The people who had seen them before knew it was like this. But that first live appearance in 1973 after Dark Side had been all over the radio was nuts. About 90% of the fans had never heard of Pink Floyd until a few months earlier.

The band came out at 8:00 as usual, non-pretentiously in their t-shirts, no announcements, IIRC they opened with something from Obscured but surely over half the people didn't even realize it was PF playing already. There was absolutely nothing familiar to them for the whole set. There was a bit of rowdiness and the band had to calm the crowd somewhat at one point.

When they came back out to do the Dark Side of the Moon, it's been different than it was the hour before.

Ever since.

I was fortunate enough to see David Gilmour play live this past October at Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The energy when he played Comfortably Numb was absolutely indescribable.

I, too, think that Animals is a masterpiece. Also agree that it's "overlooked" (though some others in the comments seem to have a different assessment) -- most people I know can name tracks from Dark Side and The Wall but that's about it. The songs are too long for radio.

"Dogs" is my favorite Pink Floyd song of all time, both lyrically and Gilmour's playing.

"You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to. So that when they turn their backs on you, you'll get the chance to put the knife in."

> The energy when he played Comfortably Numb was absolutely indescribable.

Also, the unbelieveable rendition with David Bowie in Royal Albert Hall in 2006. Bowie singing between the notes but in perfect key, Gilmour's solo grittier than usual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkN7qyaFEUU

If you like this, then Bowie's amazing overtones on Placebo's "without you I'm nothing" is something you should love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c14qMbmP9eg

I found Animals weirdly disappointing after Dark Side and Wish. Maybe I'll give it another go.

A great sampler of earlier PF is Ummagumma, the double combo live and studio album.

FWIW, Live at Pompeii is free on Youtube.

Oh man, I had a fuzzy, nth-copy VHS tape of Live at Pompeii when I was in high school. I'll have to check that out, thanks!

I listened pf back and forth for years. What i never get tired of is Meddle and Atom Heart Mother. Maybe because its not heavely played. I was once at a tribute show where three different bands were playing. The last band were three guys playing Atom Heart Mother. They nailed it. No orchestra just the spirit of early pf.

If we’re making recommendations of non-obvious Pink Floyd things to recommend we have to include Live At Pompeii, a feature length live concert movie.

I must have watched the version of Echoes a thousand times it’s utterly mesmerizing.

This was originally billed as "The Pink Floyd Movie" and was only in selected movie theaters, because there had to be facilities to accomodate the Quadraphonic surround sound concert speaker system that toured with it.

Never widely seen to begin with, and did not re-appear until many years later in some form.

It usually doesn't take 1000 times to realize what I saw that day.

So I don't know if this is part of it any more, but the live Pompeii scenes were all material from before Dark Side, ensemble playing and it looked like they were having a good time there.

In the original movie, between the outdoor live scenes where they were just having fun, they would cut to out-takes from Dark Side studio sessions, often one member at a time with headphones, subdued atmosphere, carefuly crafting an effort to be as popular as they could be. Not boring but you could tell they were not having the same kind of fun. Very interesting actually but excitement jumped back up whenever they cut back to Pompeii.

It was basically a documentary of what it was like before most people ever heard of them.

And it looked like they really wanted people to see the difference in the previous stuff that millions had missed not only on record, but missed live when it was first released.

Check out this truly classic first time listen reaction video for Dogs off the Animals album [1]. (Who is that guitarist?!)

King KTF makes you appreciate this track even more than you believed :-)

[1] https://youtu.be/JBPRSKRnpyI?feature=shared

I like The Wall musically and was a big fan of Pink Floyd.

However, overall, it annoyed me for being too dark and cynical. Maybe it's because I come from a family of teachers and saw all the town ratbags and losers enjoying singing "We Don't Need No Education".

The wall was performed live in only 4 cities (LA, NYC, London, Berlin) because it was too big and expensive to move. My dad saw it and to this day it’s one of his favorite experiences. They literally built a styrofoam wall in front of the band as they played until at one point you can’t even see them.

Well anyway about 15 years ago I’m showing the old man YouTube for the first time. And I ask him, is there any old memories we should go look up, he says, see if there’s any videos from The Wall. And there is! An entire bootleg of the concert from 1981. It was magical, I gave my dad a Time Machine.

Thanks YouTube!

> They literally built a styrofoam wall on front of the band as they played until at one point you can’t even see them.

I never had the chance to go to a Pink Floyd concert, but I saw Roger Waters a few years ago and the huge wall was there too, along with a helicopter if I remember well.

Christmas is coming, I suggest gifting him The Wall: Live in Berlin 1990 on DVD if you can find it. Or just forwarding him this URL: https://youtu.be/SU2m7uOiAZI

One of my favourite live performances of music of all time. Playing at the Real wall to several hundred thousand people. Just amazing stuff.

> One of my favourite live performances of music of all time.

As a broke college kid, my friends and I all camped out for tickets (remember those days) to the Division Bell tour in 1994. We got phenomenal seats, and the show is definitely the bet live performances I have seen. The second act as a complete play through of Dark Side. Lots of great memories from that entire night including sitting in traffic to get to the venue. Getting lost in the parking lot in pouring down rain to the point of asking the cops for directions to where we parked.

I got into Floyd from my dad, and he never got to see them live. The closest he got was 15 years later when we went to see Aussie Floyd. It was the closest thing to the real thing I had ever seen and told him it was a really damn good 2nd place.

I unfortunately didn't have the opportunity to watch Pink Floyd play live.

I did watch Roger Waters play The Wall twice though. Complete with styrofoam wall and an airplane flying overhead and crashing onto it.

Incredible concert! Hence the second time. :)

One of my two most vivid memories is seeing pink Floyd live while on acid.

I'm not advocating for drug use unless you can get a time machine and go see them at the height of their fame. And then I am immediately advocating for you to be on acid.

And end up like Syd Barrett or Pep Mangione? No thanks.

> They literally built a styrofoam wall

Hope they know the difference between inches and feet [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/zg5Ovdu6bOE?feature=shared

I saw the show in London. As a show it was brilliant and an unforgettable night. As live music performances better around then were The Cure and Mike Oldfield.

Thanks for posting this! one of my fav albums of ALL time. <3

Growing up in a developing country, where rock music wasn't really the preferred or even the available kind, _The Wall_ was foundational to me as a young teen and in early college years. The angst, the lyrics, the music - I drank heavy doses of Pink Floyd with whatever was available (bootleg cassette tapes, mostly, listened to on portable tape players and boomboxes). Much later did I learn that the original PF foursome had disbanded even before I started listening to them. That was a crushing blow :-( Those were the pre pre-Internet days.

I still listen to PF today, roughly 30+ years after I first heard them. And still find new nuances that I eluded my initial thousand listens.

Thanks for posting this <3 You've made at least one person nostalgic. And happy.

Wow it's impressive to see that this page has remained up for so long!

I used to email the owner a long time ago when I was really getting into Pink Floyd in high school. It was one of the first times I can really recall about having long, ongoing conversations online about something I was becoming increasingly passionate about. I really enjoyed the debate and back and forth that they were willing to entertain with me.

Sadly it looks like those conversations have been lost to time/old email addresses. But the idea that people would be open and willing to chat about their hobbies is really what defined the internet to me of that age.

I had a similar relationship in the 90's with the guy who started the Magnum Mania website for fans of the show Magnum PI. It was fun to communicate directly with somebody who was even more enthusiastic about the show than I was, and fun to send him pictures when I bought my Ferrari 308 after seeing the car on the show and literally saving up for it for 20 years. I haven't talked to him in many years now, and he doesn't seem to update the website as much these days, but the forum there is still pretty active, and there's still tons of info available.

There is an episode of the original run of Magnum wherein a character picks up a phone and dials “9, 1,” as though they are about to call emergency services, and then hangs up the phone instead. I think, but am not sure, that the caller is using a phone on the Masters estate.

Any idea which episode I’m referring to?

Sure, that’s easy. Season 1, Episode 8, titled "Deadly Manuevers“.

(Ok, to be fair, I cheated. I asked ChatGPT)

Did you verify?

ie. pull the descriptive subtitles or watch the indicated episode?

I'm not sure we've yet reached the stage of having a high degree of confidence in the strict accuracy of ChatGPT responses.

Season one, episode eight of Magnum, P.I. was entitled, “The Ugliest Dog in Hawaii.”

There are, of course, episodes of both Knight Rider and The A Team that share that tile, though.

While I am appreciative that you want to demonstrate precisely how useless LLMs are, I wonder if perhaps you could do something more productive than make work for me.

One day after school, my dad and I arrived home and he told me, "Sit down in the lounge room, and don't talk". I thought I was in some kind of trouble, but when he didn't turn on any lights, and walked over to the CD player I knew something was about to happen.

"We're going to listen to something, and I don't want to say anything until it's done", he said. Then he proceeded to play "A Momentary Lapse of Reason". It changed my life.

It was the first time I realised you can listen to music like you'd watch a film. The depth of the soundscapes still influence me as a musician today.

Thanks dad.

I was in 8th grade when this came out and it was like catnip for angst-y teens. Our music teacher actually went over the lyrics of Another Brick In the Wall (Part 2) line-by-line with our class. He was not a fan. He tried to explain how wrong-headed each and every line was. Needless to say, he didn't win any hearts and minds, but we did appreciate listening to PF in music class.

Bear in mind, this guy also paddled the hell out of a kid who threw a pencil ("you could blind someone that way!") And by paddle, I mean a cricket-bat sized piece of wood, hands up against the lockers. Teacher, leave them kids alone!

> Our music teacher actually went over the lyrics of Another Brick In the Wall (Part 2) line-by-line with our class. He was not a fan. He tried to explain how wrong-headed each and every line was.

Hahah, next thing you know, the police academy instructors will go over the lyrics of Fuck Tha Police and conclude that every line is wrong-headed :)

I got paddled by my school before by a wannabe dictator administrator, that guy ended up going to jail for literally breaking some kid's ass.

Obviously The Wall resonated well with me :)

I got hooked on Pink Floyd's "Momentary Lapse of Reason". Listened to it on a 10 hour drive back home from Houston in my custom VW beetle. It was custom because I "built" it out of several broken down beetles and so it was a tense drive home, checking my car's vitals every so often.

I have never forgotten that long intense drive home, in the summer, with no air conditioning, and playing Pink Floyd on full volume the whole way.

Because of this, "The Wall" has always been Floyd's second best album.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason is right up there with Dark Side of the Moon in number of listen-throughs for me. Back when I was in high school it was one of the albums I’d put on prior to getting lost in working on something or another in Photoshop.

It's a well-written and insightful analysis, which is hard to do.

A Rolling Stone Magazine writer once said something like "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." So, good writing about music deserves appreciation.

I love the coments, everybody is riffing on varios pink floydian experiences and nobody has read the article just the title of the article is way way out there, like what kind of mad heavy drugs do you have to take to go so far as to build a web site devoted to ,oooooooooooo, wow, mang, like, did you get the total asomosity of that mang, toadaly awsome, the complete analyis, complete with 2 sheets of blotter, a car with 4 more people than seats, and three more in the trunk, cheap night at the drive in movies playing the wall.

so you think you can tell

anylise that

For someone so willing to criticize the interests and hobbies of others, your spelling and grammar need a lot of work.

One of my most strange and wonderful audio adventure i ever had. I remember the first time i got my hand on "The Wall" album and listened to it in complete darkness, lights out. It got me into an adventure through all the album. I could not understand the lyrics at the time, as i am not a english native speaker, the sound alone told an incredible journey through emotions and i swear i could see lots of things in the darkness. I remember that when i finished listening to the album i was emotionally in tears...

I grew up in the country so during HS the only music i knew was either country/western or heavy metal. I didn't hear this album until college, i fell in love with it but my more sophisticated friends didn't think that highly of it. I still listen to The Wall end to end on long trips driving by myself.

My physics teacher played the whole album in high school class as we were doing our work. The door to the classroom was open and the music was echoing through the whole floor. I was surprised none of the teachers next door said anything.

My jr high recollection was a teacher complaining about the bad grammar. “We don’t need no education…”

When I was 14 or so I took a long bus ride downtown to buy The Wall on vinyl. The ride back home was torture, gazing at that beautiful art work and not being able to listen.

Seeing Roger Waters performing the entirety of The Wall in 2013 was nothing short of life-changing for me

// Did read the article.

Try Roger Waters' “The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking”, the album that nearly was instead of The Wall.

From Wikipedia:

In July 1978, Waters presented the concepts and played demos of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking as well as what was then titled Bricks in the Wall, which became The Wall, to his bandmates in Pink Floyd, asking them to decide which should be a group album, and which should be his solo album. After a long debate, they decided that they preferred the concept of Bricks in the Wall, even though their manager at the time, Steve O'Rourke, thought that Pros and Cons was a better-sounding concept, and David Gilmour deemed Pros and Cons stronger musically.

The entire story is framed in real time as a fitful dream taking place in the early morning hours of 4:30:18 am to 5:12:32 am on an unspecified day. ...

Eric Clapton plays lead guitar, David Sandborn sax, and Michael Kamen piano (plus his orchestra).

It's worth the time, if for no other reason than to see if your experience is the same as Rolling Stone's:

Roger Waters' first official solo album will be of sustained interest mainly to postanalytic Pink Floyd fetishists and other highly evolved neurotics who persist in seeking spiritual significance amid the flotsam of English art rock. I can't imagine that anyone else will sit more than once through this strangely static, faintly hideous record, on which Waters' customary bile is, for the first time, diluted with musical bilge.

No "highly evolved neurotics" here, of course.

Roger Waters bloviating for 90 minutes about not having a dad.

Good tunes, though.

Gilmour can write good music. Too bad Wright was suffering from depression/drug addiction to be very productive. The best Pink Floyd songs are them working together.

Division Bell came out and took me a while to appreciate, but man I like that album as much as Dark Side and Meddle. I'm not saying they are all equal, just that I like them all equally. Gilmour is definitely my favorite bender of strings.

People are sometimes unkind to the Division Bell, but it contains one of my personal favorites: "Wearing the inside out". Wright's lyrics and vocals (first time since The Dark Side of the Moon), Gilmore's guitar, it all comes together.

It's a theme he.... revisited.

This is the best visit, though.

Took me dad in the war yeah

You forgot about the overprotective mum.

"Of course mama'll help to build the wall"

Tommy by The Who has related themes and is better IMHO.

Yeah. Love the music but I stopped being able to listen to it a few years ago because it's so.. self-indulgent and emo. It kind of ruined PF for me since I became aware of those themes in their other albums with Waters.

I still love and respect PF, but I don't listen much these days. I guess it also correlates with less substance abuse in my life.

Just as a fan of the music, I picked up the DVD set he released a few years ago. It was delivered to the office I was working at the time, and it was a slow day so we popped it in for a watch. Talking about a let down. It was the exact Waters droning on sentiment the GP had.

I recently took a long car trip solo and was able to listen to Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety without interruption. It still holds up in that kind of scenario; you almost have to listen to whole thing nonstop to fully appreciate it.

> I still love and respect PF

Me too.

My teenage years sitting in the sun smoking pot listening to these incredible sounds....

As a grown up I love everything they did before Dark Side of the Moon: That was when Roger Waters really started complaining.

Atom Heart Mother is my favourite

I don't think the self indulgence is unbearable until The Trial and "you stand accused of showing feelings of an almost human nature". The Trial is comedy/satire but since the rest of the album is serious and autobiographical, I roll my eyes at what a diva he sounds like there.

Why is that an inappropriate theme? 90 minutes isn't long or large for a single work of art, and many artists return to the same themes over their lifetimes.

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