Roger Waters - Amused to Death (320 kbps) - 1992

George Roger Waters (born 6 September 1943) is an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. In 1965, he co-founded the progressive rock band Pink Floyd with drummer Nick Mason, keyboardist Rick Wright and guitarist, singer, and songwriter Syd Barrett. Waters initially served as the group's bassist, but following the departure of Barrett in 1968, he also became their lyricist, conceptual leader and co-lead vocalist.

Pink Floyd subsequently achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. By the early 1980s, they had become one of the most critically acclaimed and best-selling acts in the history of popular music; as of 2013, they have sold more than 250 million albums worldwide, including 75 million units sold in the United States. Amid creative differences within the group, Waters left in 1985 and began a legal dispute with the remaining members over their intended use of the band's name and material. They settled out of court in 1987, and nearly eighteen years passed before he performed with them again.

Waters' solo career has included three studio albums: The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Radio K.A.O.S. and Amused to Death. In 1990, he staged one of the largest and most extravagant rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin, with an official attendance of 200,000. As a member of Pink Floyd, he was inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. That same year he released Ça Ira, an opera in three acts translated from Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gils' libretto about the French Revolution. Later that year, he reunited with Pink Floyd bandmates Mason, Wright and David Gilmour for the Live 8 global awareness event; it was the group's first appearance with Waters since 1981. He has toured extensively as a solo act since 1999 and played The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety for his world tour of 2006–2008. In 2010, he began The Wall Live and in 2011 Gilmour and Mason appeared with him during a performance of the double-album in London. As of 2013, the tour is the highest-grossing of all time by a solo artist.

Waters has been married four times; first in 1969 to his childhood sweetheart Judy Trim; they divorced in 1975. The following year he married Lady Carolyne Christie; the marriage produced a son, Harry Waters, a musician who has played keyboards with his father's touring band since 2006, and a daughter, India Waters, who has worked as a model. Christie and Waters divorced in 1992, and in 1993, he married Priscilla Phillips. They had one son together, Jack Fletcher, before getting divorced in 2001. In 2012, Waters married actress and filmmaker Laurie Durning.

Amused to Death is a concept album, and the third studio album by former Pink Floyd bassist/vocalist Roger Waters. It was released in 1992. A remastered remix for which Waters worked with James Guthrie was released in 2015, including a Blu-ray option.

Roger Waters started working on Amused to Death in 1987 when he first wrote "Perfect Sense". It was several years before the album was released and it is unknown how much the material was changed in the interim. The album's artwork features a monkey watching television in reference to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The image on the TV is a gigantic eyeball staring at the viewer. According to Waters, the monkey 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." The album's title was inspired by Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The album 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 "Raz" Razzell, a member of the Royal Fusiliers (much like Waters' father Eric Fletcher Waters had been in World War II) 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 track also features the sound of several animals. 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.

"Perfect Sense" is a two-part song about a world where live transmissions of wars are the main form of entertainment. The first part of the song begins with a loud, unintelligible rant, and then a backwards message voiced by 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 character of the teacher in The Wall. In the second part, famed sportscaster Marv Albert narrates a war as if it were a basketball game.

"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" includes a reference to a song written by Waters on Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals, "Sheep" (not to mention the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"). In "Sheep", Waters sings "I've looked over Jordan and I have seen..." Waters references and expands on this line in "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" when he sings "I looked over Jordan and what did I see/Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris". "Late Home Tonight, Part I" recalls the 1986 US air strike against Libya from the perspective of two "ordinary wives" and a young American F-111 pilot. 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 makes 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 plagiarised 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 film's 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 Waters, opens with the same line.


Genre: Rock, progressive rock.

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Track listing
01. "The Ballad of Bill Hubbard" 4:20
02. "What God Wants, Part I" 6:00
03. "Perfect Sense, Part I" 4:14
04. "Perfect Sense, Part II" 2:51
05. "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" 4:44
06. "Late Home Tonight, Part I" 4:01
07. "Late Home Tonight, Part II" 2:12
08. "Too Much Rope" 5:47
09. "What God Wants, Part II" 3:39
10. "What God Wants, Part III" 4:08
11. "Watching TV" 6:06
12. "Three Wishes" 6:52
13. "It's a Miracle" 8:30
14. "Amused to Death" 9:06
Total length: 01:12:45

All songs written by Roger Waters.