Walls in Popular Culture
Walls are often seen in popular culture representing barriers preventing progress or entry. For example, the progressive/psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd used a metaphorical wall to represent the isolation felt by the protagonist of their 1979 concept album The Wall. American poet laureate Robert Frost describes a pointless rock wall as a metaphor for the myopia of the culture-bound in his poem Mending Wall. In a real-life example, the Berlin Wall, constructed by the Soviet Union to divide Berlin into NATO and Warsaw Pact zones of occupation, became a worldwide symbol of oppression and isolation.
In some cases, a wall may refer to an individual's debilitating mental or physical condition, seen as an impassable barrier.
Another common usage is as a communal surface to write upon. For instance the social networking site Facebook uses an electronic "wall" to log the scrawls of friends.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, walls, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.”
—Gerald W. Johnson (1890–1980)
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)