Amused to Death

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Amused to Death
Amused to Death cover
Studio album by Roger Waters
Released September 1, 1992
Recorded 1992 (?)
Genre Rock
Length 72:45
Label Columbia Records
Producer(s) Roger Waters, Nick Griffiths, Patrick Leonard
Professional reviews
Roger Waters chronology
Radio K.A.O.S.
(1987)		 Amused to Death
(1992)		 In the Flesh Live
(2000)


Amused to Death is a solo album by former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters, released in 1992 (see 1992 in music).

Contents

[edit] Overview

Featuring Jeff Beck on guitar, Amused to Death further explores Waters' disillusionment with modern Western society, focusing specifically on the influence of television and the mass media. The album was inspired by the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, a critique of television and its related culture by Neil Postman.

In typical Waters fashion, Amused to Death is a concept album— this one organized loosely around the idea of a monkey randomly switching channels on a television— but explores numerous political and social themes, including a critique of the first Gulf War, in which Waters has a loud choir sing his "global anthem" : "Can't you see? It all makes perfect sense. Expressed in dollars and cents, pounds, shillings, and pence." The song "Watching TV" explores the influence of mass media on the Chinese protests for democracy in Tiananmen Square.

The album is mixed in QSound to enhance the spatial feel of the audio, and the many Waters-style sound effects on the album - rifle range ambience, sleighbells, cars, planes, distant horses and dogs all make use of the 3-D facility. This album's stellar audio quality also caught the attention of renowned audio mastering guru Bob Katz, who placed Amused to Death on his Honor Roll List of Good-Sounding Pop CDs (as seen at digido.com).

Amused to Death reached #21 on The Billboard 200, aided by "What God Wants, Part I", which hit #4 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks in 1992.

[edit] Miscellanea

  • The first song, "The Ballad of Bill Hubbard", features a sample of World War I veteran Alf Razzell, who describes his account of finding fellow soldier Bill Hubbard severely wounded on the battlefield is forced to abandon him. This sample is continued in the titular song "Amused to Death".
  • The third song, "Perfect Sense (Part I)" begins with a loud, unintelligible scream, and after that one can hear backwards-uttered words scattered about for the first two minutes of the song. Played on reverse, this message tells that Roger has decided to record a backwards message "to Stanley and all the other book burners". The message climaxes with the loud scream, which interestingly enough makes no more sense in reverse (although it can be said that it sounds angry in the way of cartoon swearing). Waters stated in an interview with Rockline on 8 February 1993 that he wanted to use samples of HAL 9000 on the album, but Kubrick turned him down on the basis that it would open the door to many other people using the sound sample, which is why he mocks Kubrick in the song.[1] He has since then used audio of HAL from 2001 when he performs the song live (as an intro, specifically during his In The Flesh concert tour).
  • Also, in "Perfect Sense, Pt.2", Marv Albert gives a mock commentary on the destruction of an oil rig by submarine.
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea recorded a part for the album (specifically for a different, more uptempo version of "It's a Miracle"), but this was not used.
  • Waters wrote portions of the lyrics by verbally improvising over the music.
  • BBC Radio 1 refused to play the first single from the album, "What God Wants (Part I)" due to its lyrical content, outraging Waters. Two other singles along with "What God Wants" were released in Europe as "Three Wishes" and "The Bravery of Being Out of Range". These two singles (as well as a video for "Three Wishes") were slated for release in the US but were eventually cancelled.
  • On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the first song written by Roger opens with the lyric 'Doctor, Doctor'. Although probably a coincidence, 'Amused to Death' begins with the same line.
  • Don Henley contributed harmony vocals to the song "Watching TV"
  • Charles Fleischer (better known as the voice of Roger Rabbit) performs the greedy evangelist's sermon at the beginning of "What God Wants (Part II)".
  • The album title "Amused to Death" was attached to material that Waters began working on during the Radio KAOS tour. A prototype album cover was reportedly distributed to his record company, which included caricatures of three figures resembling David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, floating in a martini glass. However, it was several years before the album was finally released, and it is unknown how much the material was changed in the interim. At the very least, the songs criticising the first Gulf War and Tiananmen Square were new or heavily rewritten, as those events occurred after the original writing.

[edit] Quotes

" The album title came from a short book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is about the history of the media, particularly as it relates to political communication - i.e., how things have changed since such works as Lincoln's speeches were made available for the general public to read."

"And I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why it was that our end came before its time, and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death."

"Things coalesced slowly as I became more and more interested or obsessed, pick your word, with the inordinately powerful and all-encompassing effect that television seems to have on the human race. My general view is that television when it becomes commercialized and profit-based tends to trivialize and dehumanize our lives."

"So I became interested in this idea of television as a two-edged sword, that it can be a great medium for spreading information and understanding between peoples, but when it's a tool of our slavish adherence to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is the god that we should all bow down to, it's a very dangerous medium. Because it's so powerful."

"I think the motivation is at the root of its current evil, i.e. it's because they have to compete in an open marketplace that their standards get reduced so the programming tends to end up as the cheapest possible saleable item. I don't believe that wanting to beat the opposition makes for good programming, but it's an ideology that is still rigidly adhered to."

— Roger Waters, speaking about the album to the LA Times, September, 1992

[edit] Track listing

  1. "The Ballad of Bill Hubbard" – 4:19
  2. "What God Wants, Part I" – 6:00
  3. "Perfect Sense, Part I" – 4:16
  4. "Perfect Sense, Part II" – 2:50
  5. "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" – 4:43
  6. "Late Home Tonight, Part I" – 4:00
  7. "Late Home Tonight, Part II" – 2:13
  8. "Too Much Rope" – 5:47
  9. "What God Wants, Part II" – 3:41
  10. "What God Wants, Part III" – 4:08
  11. "Watching TV" – 6:07
  12. "Three Wishes" – 6:50
  13. "It's a Miracle" – 8:30
  14. "Amused to Death" – 9:06

All songs written and composed by Roger Waters.

It reached #21 but failed to go Gold.

[edit] Personnel

[edit] Charts

Album - Billboard (North America)

Year Chart Position
1992 The Billboard 200 21

Singles - Billboard (North America)

Year Song Chart Position
1992 What God Wants Pt. 1 Billboard's Mainstream Rock 2

[edit] External links

Roger Waters
Discography
Studio albums: The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking | Radio KAOS | Amused to Death | Ça Ira |
Soundtracks: Music from "The Body" | When the Wind Blows
Live: The Wall Live in Berlin | In the Flesh Live
Compilations: Flickering Flame
Singles: The Tide Is Turning | What God Wants, Pt. 1 | To Kill the Child/Leaving Beirut
Videos and DVDs
Pink Floyd The Wall | The Wall Live in Berlin | In the Flesh Live | The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon
Tours
In the Flesh | The Dark Side of the Moon Live
Related articles
Pink Floyd | David Gilmour | Alan Parker | Gerald Scarfe | Ron Geesin | The Final Cut | The Wall | Amusing Ourselves to Death
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