Amused to Death
| Amused to Death | |||||
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| Studio album by Roger Waters | |||||
| Released | 1 September 1992 | ||||
| Recorded | 1987–1992 | ||||
| Genre | Rock,progressive rock | ||||
| Length | 72:45 | ||||
| Label | Columbia | ||||
| Producer | Patrick Leonard, Roger Waters, Nick Griffiths | ||||
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| Roger Waters studio chronology | |||||
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| The 2015 Remaster cover art | |||||
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| Singles from Amused to Death | |||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Chicago Tribune |  |
| Entertainment Weekly | A– |
| Los Angeles Times | |
| Spectrum Culture | |
Amused to Death is the third studio album by Roger Waters. It was released in 1992, and is his most recent studio album.
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 chimpanzee 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 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." The album's title was inspired by Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The album is organised loosely around the idea of an ape 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.
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