" What Shall We Do Now? " (work title Backs to the Wall ) is a song by Pink Floyd, written by Roger Waters.
It was originally intended to be on their 1979 album The Wall , and appeared in demo versions of The Wall , but was omitted due to the time restraints of the vinyl format. In its place is a much shorter song, titled "Empty Spaces", which segues directly into "Young Lust". This was a last-minute decision; the album's sleeve notes still feature the song in its track listing, and include its lyrics.
"What Shall We Do Now?" would be performed at all concerts for The Wall, taking the place of "Empty Spaces", and so appears on Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81 . It was also included in Waters' 1990 The Wall Concert in Berlin, and so appears on the album The Wall Live in Berlin .
Composition
The beginning of the song is built similarly to "Empty Spaces": a slow, dark progression that moves towards the lyrical section, which bears a significant difference to that of "Empty Spaces". Here, the lyrics are more literal, citing album protagonist Pink's life as a rock star as a reason for building his wall.
Where "Empty Spaces" ends and moves into "Young Lust", "What Shall We Do Now?" continues into an entirely different direction, exploding into a fast pace. The lyrics describe the superficial life of rock stars and its detrimental effect on Pink.
The members of Pink Floyd themselves have helped foster and further confusion about the identity of this track by mis-identifying it as "Empty Spaces" on more than one occasion, such as in the track listing for the film version of The Wall , and on Waters' The Wall Live in Berlin . On other occasions (such as the officially released live version), the first and second parts of the track are divided and identified as "Empty Spaces" and "What Shall We Do Now" respectively, which is erroneous; they are in fact two distinct parts of the same song, the first of which was later intended to be reprised as "Empty Spaces".
The studio version has not been officially released on any CD to date, but has been widely bootlegged from the film (with the audio taken from VHS, laserdisc and DVD sources over the decades).
The Film
The song was featured in the film version of The Wall , coupled with an animated sequence by Gerald Scarfe. The animation — described by Roger Waters in the DVD commentary as "The Fucking Flowers" — starts with the image of two flowers caressing each other. Synchronized to the music, the flowers both have sex (taking the shape of a human couple doing so) with the male flower at one point is shaped like a penis, and the final form of the female flower is of a vulva, having a fight (turning into snake-like monsters bearing some resemblance to one of the incarnations of the "razor" decapitating a man in another Scarfe-produced animation for Pink Floyd - "Welcome to the Machine") and ultimately ending with the "female" flower consuming and destroying the "male" flower.
The flower sequence ends as soon as the first lyrics ("What shall we use...") are sung. The female flower, now transformed into a pterodactyl-like creature, flies into the distance as a row of residential and commercial buildings appears. These, however, turn out to be a wall of many post-war goods and appliances, which slowly surrounds a "sea of faces". As the song speeds up and launches into "Shall we buy a new guitar?/Shall we drive a more powerful car?...", the animation becomes largely abstract and psychedelic — heads of people caught in the wall screaming (the screaming face, seen later in "Waiting For The Worms"), flowers turn into barbed wire, a baby suffers a metamorphosis and turns into a reptile and then into a Neo-Nazi stormtrooper, who smashes the head of an innocent man with a rail and finally - the wall breaks through a church (representing religion) and the rubble turns into casino-like temple, which produces more and more (albeit neon) bricks. The image of Pink is contorted and transformed into an array of objects relating to the materialistic nature of Pink's wall: ice cream, a naked woman, a hypodermic needle, a Fender Precision Bass guitar, a BMW M1, an MP-40... The sequence ends as Pink becomes a hammer (a hammer that would reappear in the animated sequence of "Waiting for the Worms"