Amused to Death is the third studio album by English musician Roger Waters,released 7 September 1992 on Columbia. Produced by Waters and Patrick Leonard,it was mixed in QSound to enhance its spatial feel. The album features Jeff Beck on lead guitar on several tracks. The album's title was inspired by Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In 2015,the album was remastered and re-released with new artwork and in different formats,including a new 5.1 surround sound mix by original engineer James Guthrie,assisted by Joel Plante.
Background and production
Roger Waters started working on Amused to Death in 1987 when he first wrote "Perfect Sense."[1] It was several years before the album was released.
Amused to Death was produced by Patrick Leonard,Waters,and was co-produced with Nick Griffiths in London at The Billiard Room,Olympic Studios,CTS Studios,Angel Recording Studios and Abbey Road Studios. The album was engineered by Hayden Bendall,Jerry Jordan,and Stephen McLaughlan and mixed by James Guthrie.[2] 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.
Amused to Death is the only studio album by Waters to not have a tour supporting it,though some songs were performed during the In The Flesh[3] and Us + Them tours,[4] and "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" was performed on the This Is Not A Drill tour.[5]
Themes
The album centers around the effects of televised mass media.
The album is loosely organized around the idea of an ape randomly switching channels on a television,[6] 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 track,"The Ballad of Bill Hubbard",features the voice of World War I veteran Alfred Razzell[de]. A member of the Royal Fusiliers,he describes 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. The tale is continued at the end of the title track,at the very end of the album,providing a coda to the tragic story,with Razzell describing how he finally found peace. The excerpts are from BBC television's 1991 Everyman documentary,"A Game of Ghosts",marking the 75th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme.[7][8][9] "I found it very moving," Waters remarked. "That original programme confronted the horrors of war and told the real story. It was an example of television taking its responsibilities seriously."[10] The opening track also features the sound of several animals.[6]
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 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 being changed and a burst of ape-chatter.
"Perfect Sense" is a two-part song about a world where live transmissions of wars are the main form of entertainment.[1] The first part begins with a loud,unintelligible rant,then a backwards message from Waters:"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 teacher in The Wall. In the second part,sportscasterMarv Albert narrates a war as if it were a basketball game. "My main inspiration behind the song 'Perfect Sense'," Waters explained,"came from thinking about the days of the Roman Empire,when they would flood the Colosseum and have fights between rival galleys. I've always been intrigued by this notion of war as an entertainment to mollify the folks back home,and the Gulf conflict fuelled that idea."[11]
Several tracks on the album comment on and criticize the Gulf War.
"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" includes a reference to a song written by Waters on Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals,"Sheep",and to "Swing Low,Sweet Chariot".[12] In "Sheep" Waters sings,"I've looked over Jordan and I have seen,things are not what they seem";in "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" he sings "I looked over Jordan and what did I see? I saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris."
"Too Much Rope" includes the line,"Each man has his price,Bob,and yours was pretty low." "I would sometimes rehearse vocal takes by impersonating Bob Dylan," Waters explained. "That line originally read,'Each man has his price,my friends…' –so make of that what you will. As a joke,I sang 'Bob' instead,and Pat (Leonard,producer) insisted that we leave it in. So,although it was unintentional,I'm happy that it's there for (Pink Floyd producer)Bob Ezrin. I hope he appreciates it."[14]
In "It's a Miracle" Waters makes a scathing reference to Andrew Lloyd Webber (whom he would accuse elsewhere of having plagiarised music from Pink Floyd's "Echoes" for sections of the musical The Phantom of the Opera):[15] The same song features a sample from the 1977 low-budget zombie film Shock Waves in which the film's characters wrestle over a flashlight.[16] The title track 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 Waters,opens with the same line.
HAL samples
Waters stated in a Rockline interview on February 8,1993,that he had wanted to use dialogue samples from 2001:A Space Odyssey on the album,specifically HAL 9000's 'dying' monologue. Stanley Kubrick,the film's director,turned him down on the basis that it would open the door to many other people using the sound sample.[17] 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.[18] Waters did use the samples of HAL describing his mind being taken away when performing live –specifically at the beginning of "Perfect Sense,Part I" during his In the Flesh tour,after Kubrick's death,and it was finally incorporated into the Amused to Death album for the 2015 remaster / remix release.
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. Nor do I have the inclination for any other reason. Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude.
Packaging
The album's original artwork features a chimpanzee watching television in reference to Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.[20] The image on the TV is a gigantic eyeball staring at the viewer.[20] According to Waters, the ape was "a symbol for anyone who's been sitting with his mouth open in front of the network and cable news for the last 10 years."[1]
AllMusic described the album as "a masterpiece in the sense that it brings together all of his obsessions in one grand, but not unwieldy, package".[21]Record Collector wrote that the album shows Waters "at his most bleakly inspired since the cautionary parable of The Wall".[28] However, the Los Angeles Times was less favorable, writing "The result is blurred structure (partly improved by the moving old-soldier's tale Waters uses as a framing device), too much repetition and a certain distance and overintellectualization. [...] overall there's a dearth of the good old pop-rock appeal that always lifted the better Pink Floyd records."[25] A negative review came from Chicago Tribune, writing "self-importance doesn't equal profundity, and the world's most mind-blowing engineering couldn't cover up the deterioration of Waters' singing and melodic sense since his days with Floyd."[22]Ultimate Classic Rock included Amused to Death on their list "Top 100 90's Rock Albums".[31]
Legacy
Waters told Classic Rock: "My view is that I've been involved in two absolutely classic albums – The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall [...] And if you haven't got Amused to Death, you haven't got the full set. So this album – the live one, which pulls together songs from all three albums – hopefully redresses the balance."[citation needed] On 19 September 2013, Waters told BBC HardTalk that Amused to Death has been completely underrated.[32][33]
On 15 April 2015, Waters announced that the album would be remastered and reissued on 24 July 2015 featuring a new 5.1 multichannel audio mix, as well as a new stereo mix. It was made available in a number of formats, including CD, SACD, Blu-ray and high-resolution downloads.[34] In a review of the 2015 remastering of the album, journalist J.C. Maçek III of Spectrum Culture wrote that "Not every album can be a masterpiece, but Waters has stated that Amused to Death is an underrated effort that serves as a third part to Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. But it's nowhere near those other albums. The 2015 remastering makes it a good sounding album, but it's just not the kind of infinitely listenable album that Waters is capable of creating."[30] In its review of the 2015 reissue, PopMatters wrote: "not only has Amused to Death aged well musically, it has unfortunately aged well thematically too. [...] Amused to Death was and still is a powerful statement from one of rock music's most literate misanthropes. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to believe that it slipped under everyone's radar so thoroughly."[27]Drowned in Sound wrote: "Amused to Death stands up on its own as one of the better, more intriguing post-Floyd records".[23]
In 2016 Amused to Death won the Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards. The winners were listed as follows: "James Guthrie, surround mix engineer; James Guthrie & Joel Plante, surround mastering engineers; James Guthrie, surround producer (Roger Waters) Label: Columbia/Legacy"
Commercial performance
Amused to Death reached No. 8 on the UK Albums Chart, Waters' first Top 10 as a solo artist in his homeland, and a career high of No. 21 on the Billboard 200, aided by "What God Wants, Part I", which hit No. 4 on Billboard'sMainstream Rock Tracks chart in 1992. It was also certified Silver by the British Phonographic Industry for sales of over 60,000 in the UK.[35]
The Wall is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 30 November 1979 by Harvest/EMI and Columbia/CBS Records. It is a rock opera about Pink, a jaded rock star who constructs a psychological "wall" of social isolation. The album was a commercial success, topping the US charts for 15 weeks and reaching number three in the UK. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom found it overblown and pretentious, but later received accolades as one of the greatest albums of all time.
Animals is the tenth studio album by English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 21 January 1977 through Harvest Records and Columbia Records. It was self-produced at Pink Floyd's Britannia Row Studios in London throughout 1976. The album continued the long-form compositions that made up such previous works as Meddle (1971) and Wish You Were Here (1975).
Wish You Were Here is the ninth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 12 September 1975 through Harvest Records in the UK and Columbia Records in the US, their first for the label. Based on material Pink Floyd composed while performing in Europe, Wish You Were Here was recorded over numerous sessions throughout 1975 at EMI Studios in London.
Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It was released by Harvest on 2 October 1970 in the United Kingdom, and by Capitol on 10 October 1970 in the United States. It was recorded at EMI Studios in London, and was the band's first album to reach number 1 in the UK, while it reached number 55 in the US, eventually going gold there.
In the Flesh was a series of worldwide concert tours by Roger Waters that spanned three individual tours over the course of three years. Returning from a 12-year-long hiatus from the road, In The Flesh was a showcase of his best known work from his days with Pink Floyd, with that material dominating shows. Songs were also performed from Waters' most recently released solo album, 1992's Amused to Death, being played live for the first time. The tour's name is an allusion to the 1977 Pink Floyd tour for the Animals album, as well as the two songs so titled on the album The Wall.
The Division Bell is the fourteenth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 28 March 1994 by EMI Records in the United Kingdom and on 4 April by Columbia Records in the United States.
Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd is the fourth compilation album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 5 November 2001 by EMI internationally and a day later by Capitol Records in the United States. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart on 24 November 2001, with sales of 214,650 copies. It remained on the chart for 26 weeks. The album was certified gold, platinum and double platinum on 6 December 2001 in the US by the RIAA. It was certified triple platinum in the US on 8 January 2002, and quadruple platinum on 10 September 2007.
Delicate Sound of Thunder is a live album by English band Pink Floyd. It was recorded over five nights at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, in August 1988 and mixed at Abbey Road Studios in September 1988. It was released on 21 November 1988, through EMI Records in the UK and Columbia Records in the US.
More is the third studio album and first soundtrack album by English rock band Pink Floyd. It was released on 13 June 1969 in the United Kingdom by EMI Columbia and on 9 August 1969 in the United States by Tower Records. The soundtrack is for the film of the same name, which was primarily filmed on location on Ibiza and was the directorial debut of Barbet Schroeder. It was the band's first album without former leader Syd Barrett.
A Collection of Great Dance Songs is a compilation album by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It was released on 23 November 1981 in the United Kingdom by Harvest Records and in the United States by Columbia Records.
Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 is a live album released by Pink Floyd in 2000. It is a live rendition of The Wall, produced and engineered by James Guthrie, with tracks selected from the August 1980 and June 1981 performances at Earls Court in London. The album was first released in the United Kingdom on 27 March 2000, and a US/Canadian release by Columbia Records on 18 April.
"Eclipse" is the tenth and final track from English rock band Pink Floyd's 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. It was written and sung by Roger Waters, with harmonies by David Gilmour and Rick Wright. After Waters left the band, Gilmour sang the lead vocal when performing live.
James K. A. Guthrie is an English recording engineer and record producer best known for his work with the progressive rock band Pink Floyd serving as a producer and engineer for the band since 1978. He is the owner and operator of das boot recording in Lake Tahoe, California. Married to Melissa Kathryn (Braun) Guthrie and parent of two cats, Bert & Jack. Original music and scoring.
The Wall – Live in Berlin was a live concert performance by Roger Waters and numerous guest artists, of the Pink Floyd studio album The Wall, itself largely written by Waters during his time with the band. The show was held in Berlin on 21 July 1990, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall eight months earlier. A live album of the concert was released 21 August 1990. A video of the concert was also commercially released.
In the Flesh – Live is a two-disc live album that captures performances from Roger Waters' three-year In the Flesh tour. He states to Classic Rock that "I've been involved in two absolutely classic albums – The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. And if you haven't got Amused to Death, you haven't got the full set. So this album – the live one, which pulls together songs from all three albums – hopefully redresses the balance." The album features selected songs from a number of Pink Floyd albums, Waters' solo efforts and a new song, "Each Small Candle".
"Perfect Sense, Part I" and "Perfect Sense, Part II" are the third and fourth tracks from the concept album Amused to Death by ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters. The songs are sung partially by Roger Waters but mainly by PP Arnold on both the original album and live shows.
"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" is the fifth song and second single from the album, Amused to Death, released by former Pink Floyd bassist, Roger Waters. According to Waters, the song was written as a criticism of the neoliberal policies adopted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The Early Years 1965–1972 is a box set that compiles the early work of the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 11 November 2016. It was released by Pink Floyd Records with distribution held by Warner Music for the UK and Europe and Sony Music for the rest of the world.
Is This the Life We Really Want? is the fourth solo album by the English rock musician Roger Waters, released on 2 June 2017 by Columbia Records. It was produced by Nigel Godrich, who urged Waters to make a more concise, less theatrical album. It was Waters' first solo album since Amused to Death (1992), and his first studio work since the opera Ça Ira (2005).
The Lockdown Sessions is the fifth studio album by British musician Roger Waters, released on 9 December 2022 by Legacy Recordings. It compiles home recordings he made during lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, later remastered for this release.
Rose, Phil (2015). Roger Waters and Pink Floyd: The Concept Albums. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN9781611477610.
White, Timothy (1 August 1992). "Roger Waters' 'Death' & Rebirth". Billboard. Vol.104, no.31. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. ISSN0006-2510.
Further reading
Bargrizan, Navid (2017). "The Monkey is Amused to Death: Roger Waters' Masterpiece and its Commercial Failure". Popular Music Studies Today: Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 2017. Springer Fachmedien. pp.25–33. ISBN978-3-658-17740-9.
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