Amused to Death

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Amused to Death
Studio album by Roger Waters
Released	September 1, 1992
Recorded	1988 - 1992 (?)
Genre	Rock
Length	72:45
Label	Columbia Records
Producer(s)	Roger Waters, Nick Griffiths, Patrick Leonard
Professional reviews
All Music Guide link Rolling Stone NR link
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 1 Overview 2 Miscellanea 3 Quotes 4 Track listing 5 Personnel 6 Charts 7 External links

[edit] Overview

Most consider this his best solo work. 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 Alfred 'Alf' Razzell, a member of the Royal Fusiliers (much like Waters' father Eric Fletcher Waters had been in the following war) who describes his account of finding fellow soldier William 'Bill' Hubbard – to whom the album is dedicated to – severely wounded on the battlefield. After failed attempts to take him to safety, Razzell is forced to abandon him in no-man's land. This sample is continued at the end of the title track, at the very end of the album, providing a more upbeat coda to the tragic story.

• The second song, What God Wants (Part I), follows and greatly contrasts the moving words of Razzell by opening with the TV being tuned instead into an excerpt that sounds like it's taken from a vox pop with an oblivious young woman. She says, "I don't mind about the war. That's one of the things I like to watch, if it's a war going on. Cos then I know if, um, our side's winning, if our side's losing…" she is then ironically interrupted by the channel change and a burst of ape-chatter.

• The third song, Perfect Sense (Part I), begins with a loud, unintelligible rant, 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 screaming, 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 from 2001: A Space Odyssey on the album ("Stop, Dave" might feasibly refer to fellow Pink Floyd member David Gilmour, but "My mind is going… I can feel it" is perhaps more pertinent to the actual content and message of this record). In any case, director Stanley Kubrick turned him down on the basis that it would open the door to many other people using the sound sample, which is why Waters mocks Kubrick in the song.[1] He has since then used audio of HAL describing his mind being taken away when performing the song live (as an intro, specifically during his In the Flesh concert tours).

• Also in Perfect Sense, Pt.2, Marv Albert gives a mock commentary on the destruction of an oil rig with torpedoes fired by a 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.

• In The Bravery of Being Out of Range, Waters sings, "I looked over Jordan and what did I see. Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris" – which echoes his similar line in Sheep (from Pink Floyd's Animals (1977): "I've looked over Jordan, and I have seen things are not what they seem."

• 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, Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk, opens with the lyric, "'Doctor, Doctor" – although probably a coincidence, the concluding, title track 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 President George Bush snr ("Old timer, who you gonna kill next?" "Does the recoil remind you of sex?" etc. in The Bravery of Being Out of Range), 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.

[edit] Personnel

• Roger Waters - synthesizer, bass, guitars, vocals
• Jeff Beck - guitar on tracks 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, and solos on tracks 10 and 14
• Rita Coolidge - vocals
• Don Henley - vocals on track 11
• Michael Kamen - arranger, conductor
• John Patitucci - bass and electric guitars
• Andy Fairweather-Low - acoustic, rhythm and electric guitars, vocals
• Geoff Whitehorn - guitar
• National Philharmonic Orchestra
• Marv Albert - voices
• Charles Fleischer - voices
• P.P. Arnold - vocals
• Graham Broad - percussion & drums
• Luis Conte - percussion
• John "Rabbit" Bundrick - organ
• Denny Fongheiser - drums
• Jeff Porcaro - Drums
• B.J. Cole - steel guitar
• Bruce Gaitsch - guitars
• Rick DiFonzo - guitar
• James Johnson - bass
• Kenneth Bowen - conductor
• John Dupree - arranger, conductor, string arrangements
• Doreen Chanter - vocals
• Linsey Fiddmont - vocals
• N'Dea Davenport - vocals
• Natalie Jackson - vocals
• Jon Joyce - vocals
• Katie Kisoon - vocals
• Lynn Fiddmont - background vocals
• Jim Haas - background vocals
• Private William "Bill" Hubbard (1888-1917) - Eighth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment; dedicatee
• Alfred Razzel - voice; Royal Fusiliers

[edit] Charts

Album - UK

Year	Position
1992	8

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

• Song-by-song analysis of the album

• [http://www.digido.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=45

v • d • e 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 | Hello (I Love You)
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