Hey you and mental health

It was mid-April 2020, and we were more than a month into quarantine. I wanted to play Pink Floyd’s Hey You, so I picked up my guitar and stood in front of the open window in my room. Empathy and relating to the artist’s feelings are essential when singing something, and, given the situation we were – and still are – in, relating to the song’s protagonist, Pink, didn’t take me too much of an effort. I sang in the original key without a microphone (Roger Waters hit some very high notes in the second verse), hoping someone would listen. Once I was finished, my grandmother, my quarantine partner, who is completely clueless about rock music, came into my room and asked me who the singer was. She added that the song gave her a feeling of death. That observation struck me and led me to write this. It was fascinating, since, as I said, my grandmother is clueless about rock music and about the English language too. She didn’t say the song seemed sad, or melancholic, or full of a sense of loneliness: no, she was entirely specific about the impression it left on her. She only got that from the musical elements her ear could sense: harmony, rhythm, melody and dynamics. Her uneducated guess was more than right: like the album it’s featured in, The Wall, Hey You is without a doubt a song that deals with death – spiritual death, yes, but still death. My relationship with rock music was very controversial. You usually get into it because you hate the world and seek refuge in something that says you can change it and mess it up. I was an odd teenager: I never felt the need to rebel, and while my peers listened to Nirvana and Pink Floyd, I was into Italian singer-songwriters. I got into rock music only years later, and learned to appreciate this genre thanks also to this song, which I liked since the very first listen because it isn’t mere rebellion, but a plea for help. Pink is completely isolated from the world thanks to a wall he built by himself, but he regrets his actions and it’s too late when he realizes he desperately needs the man “out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old” with his “fading smiles”, sitting alone by his phone. He needs someone who suffers and lives alone just like him. Hey You deals with both death and strength. The powerful bass solo, Roger’s voice in the last verse. It starts with a simple arpeggio on the acoustic guitar culminating in a heart-wrenching guitar solo which is reminiscent of the military (The Worms, the movement Pink joins in this song, is unsurprisingly a Fascist Party). Here lies the genius of Pink Floyd. The simple guitar arpeggio becomes a tornado, weakness becomes strength. This strength was already within said weakness: every plea for help, despite being exclusive to the weak and to those who can’t find courage within themselves, is actually the greatest expression of strength there is. Only those who are aware they can’t be self-sufficient know how to ask for help, and their awareness is a symbol of great humility and spiritual sacrifice. In a world where human contact is now impossible or made difficult, we realize it was stronger than we thought and, like Pink, we felt – and still do – a desperate need for the person sitting next to us on the subway staring at their phone. Hey You helps us take a dive into our soul, it invites us to carefully listen to our own fragile and human plea, however desperate it might be. It teaches us there’s no heart-trending solo without an intimate arpeggio, there’s so strength without weakness