“I have become comfortably numb” becomes “I will never become comfortably numb”. The state of numbness and apathy of the rock star Pink, who is put back on his feet by a Dr. Feelgood to go on stage, is transformed into the promise not to let himself be overcome by indifference.
The new version of Comfortably NumbPink Floyd's classic The Wallarrived on streaming platforms after being presented in April in New York. Roger Waters and Palestinian singer Mona Miari play her, with parts in English and Arabic. “When I was young I dreamed of freedom,” she sings, “hope burns fierce in who I am / like roots pushing through the rubble / we shape our destiny / our light will break the darkness / we are the promise of a new dawn.”
“Why don't you speak out against genocide, particularly in Gaza?” asks Waters in a video made for the launch of Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined. «There is no answer to this question, except the true one and that is: we don't give a shit. It is a symptom of the global neoliberal capitalist regime we all live under. But we know that the Trumps of this world are just puppets in this absurd theater of death.”
Playing the Nazi rock star Pink and wearing his uniform, Roger Waters went through quite a bit of trouble during his latest tour. Now he takes a key moment in Pink's transformation to say that “it's time for a new beginning, it's time to draw a new line,” as he sings in the reimagined version of the song, in which he says we need to “go back to 1948, before the settlers stole the land” and demand “the same human rights for everyone, from the river to the sea. Palestine will be free.”
The piece was born from the soundtrack of a documentary on artists in Palestine, a project that was later abandoned. In addition to the full eight-minute version, a three-minute radio edit was also released. The video directed by David Barron and Miari, previewed during that event in New York (you can see it at this link), will be released on June 17th. At the end of the version of the video that was seen, David Gilmour no longer appears among the authors of the song.
