Amused to Death

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 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 (Roger refused to release it as long as his former bandmates were still on Columbia Records' roster), and it is unknown how much the material was changed in the interim. At the very least, the songs criticising the first Gulf War, President Bush, and Tiananmen Square were new or heavily rewritten, as those events occurred after the original writing.

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. 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 tour, after Kubrick's death).

BBC Radio 1 refused to play "What God Wants", on the album, due to its lyrical content, outraging Waters. Two other singles besides "What God Wants", "Three Wishes" and "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" (also on the album), were released in Europe. These two singles (as well as a video for "Three Wishes") were slated for release in the US but were eventually canceled.

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. 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 organized 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 basketball 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.

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.

There was no tour in support of this record, although Waters performed several songs from it on his tour In the Flesh in 1999, 2000 and 2002. During the tour The Dark Side of the Moon Live from 2006 to 2008, Waters only played two songs off the album – Perfect Sense parts 1 and 2.