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Amused to Death

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Not to be confused with Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Untitled
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[1]
Blender[2]
Entertainment Weekly(A-)[3]
Sputnikmusic [4]

Amused to Death is a concept album, and the third studio album by former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters. It was released in 1992.

The album title was attached to material that Waters began working on during the Radio K.A.O.S. tour. It was several years before the album was released (Waters refused to release it as long as his former bandmates were still on Columbia Records' roster),[citation needed] and it is unknown how much the material was changed in the interim.

In Neil Postman's book The End of Education, he remarks on the album: "(...) Roger Waters, once the lead singer of Pink Floyd, was sufficiently inspired by a book of mine to produce a CD called Amused to Death. This fact so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position to repudiate him or his kind of music."

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. Stanley Kubrick, the director, turned him down on the basis that it would open the door to many other people using the sound sample.[5] Others think that Kubrick refused because Pink Floyd had not allowed him to use music from Atom Heart Mother in his film A Clockwork Orange.[6] Waters 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 tour, after Kubrick's death). There is a backmasked message on Amused to Death that appears in the song "Perfect Sense Part 1", in which Waters' backmasked voice says, "Julia, however, in light and visions of the issues of Stanley, we have changed our minds. We have decided to include a backward message, Stanley, for you and all the other book burners."[7]

Overview

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 (not according to interview with RW where he claims he stole/borrowed the book title but the album is not from the bookAmusing Ourselves to Death, a critique of television and its related culture by Neil Postman. Continuing Waters' trend of having well-known guest guitarists featured on his solo albums, Amused to Death features Jeff Beck on lead guitar.

Like every studio album Roger Waters has recorded since The Dark Side of the Moon, Amused to Death is a concept album. This one is organised loosely around the idea of a monkey randomly switching channels on a television, but explores numerous political and social themes, including critiques of the First Gulf War in "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" and "Perfect Sense".

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, 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 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 of a child who 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…" he is then 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. "Julia, however, in the light and visions of the issues of Stanley, we changed our minds. We have decided to include a backward message. Stanley, for you, and for all the other book burners." The message climaxes with Waters yelling in the aggressive Scottish voice he used to depict the character of the teacher in The Wall.

In "Perfect Sense, Part II", famed sportscaster Marv Albert narrates a war as if it were a gridiron football game, and a massive choir sings their "global anthem":

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents
Pounds, shillings, and pence

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."

"Too Much Rope" ending consists of fading guitar section, near the end of which the four-note theme from "Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part II" can be heard.

At the beginning of "What God Wants, Part II", Charles Fleischer (better known as the voice of Roger Rabbit) performs the greedy evangelist's sermon.

The song "Watching TV" (a duet with Don Henley) explores the influence of mass media on the Chinese protests for democracy in Tiananmen Square.

Waters adds a reference to Andrew Lloyd Webber in the song "It's a Miracle":

We cower in our shelters, with our hands over our ears
Lloyd Webber's awful stuff runs for years and years and years
An earthquake hits the theatre, but the operetta lingers
Then the piano lid comes down and breaks his fucking fingers
It's a miracle

Waters asserted that Webber had plagiarized music from Pink Floyd's "Echoes" for sections of the musical The Phantom of the Opera.[8]

The concluding, title track "Amused to Death" features a sample from the 1977 low-budget zombie film Shock Waves in which the films characters wrestle over a flashlight, and begins with the lyric, "Doctor, Doctor." "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the first song written by Roger, opens with the same line.

The album is mixed in QSound to enhance the spatial feel of the audio, and the many sound effects on the album — rifle range ambience, sleigh-bells, cars, planes, distant horses, chirping crickets, and dogs — all make use of the 3-D facility. A limited "MasterSound" edition was also released.

Amused to Death reached #8 on the UK Albums Chart, Waters' first Top 10 in his homeland, and a career high of #21 on the Billboard 200, aided by "What God Wants, Part I", which hit #4 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in 1992. It was also certified Silver by the British Phonographic Industry for sales of over 60,000 in the UK.[9]

Quotations

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

Track listing

All songs were written by Roger Waters.

  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

Personnel

Charts

Album – UK

Year Position
1992 8[10]

Album – Billboard (North America)

Year Chart Position
1992 Billboard 200 21

Singles

Year Song Chart Position
1992 What God Wants Pt. 1 Billboard Mainstream Rock 4[11]
1992 What God Wants Pt. 1 UK Single Charts 35[12]

References

  1. ^ "allmusic ((( Amused to Death > Overview )))". www.allmusic.com. Retrieved 2009-10-26.
  2. ^ "Every Original CD Reviewed: Pink Floyd - Blender". www.blender.com. Retrieved 2009-10-26.
  3. ^ "Amused to Death". ew.com. 1992-09-11. Retrieved 2009-10-26. {{cite news}}: Text "Entertainment Weekly" ignored (help); Text "Music Review" ignored (help)
  4. ^ "Roger Waters - Amused To Death Review - sputnikmusic". www.sputnikmusic.com. Retrieved 2009-10-26.
  5. ^ http://www.rock.co.za/rogerwaters/
  6. ^ "The Kubrick FAQ Part 4". Retrieved 6 April 2011.
  7. ^ "Roger Waters – Perfect Sense". UGO Networks. Retrieved 2009-06-13.
  8. ^ http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/ptr/pfloyd/interview/roger2.html
  9. ^ BPI Certifications, British Phonographic Industry, retrieved 2010-05-05
  10. ^ "Chart Stats - Roger Waters - Amused To Death". www.chartstats.com. Retrieved 2009-10-26.
  11. ^ "Roger Waters: Billboard Singles". www.allmusic.com. Allmusic.
  12. ^ "UK Top 40 Hit Database". everyhit.com.
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