Amused to Death

Waters delivered his great all-round blow of social criticism, however, on his solo work „Amused to Death“, released in 1992. There you find media criticism, criticism of religion, criticism of capitalism and, of course, anti-war rhetoric – and all of this across the full album length of some 70 minutes. Seen in this light, „Amused to death“ is not an anti-war song but an entire anti-war album.

We Are Amusing Ourselves to Death

Waters was inspired at the time by the book „Amusing Ourselves to Death“ by the US media scholar Neil Postman, published in 1985. In it Postman argues the thesis that public discourse in the television age is becoming increasingly shallow. Every subject, be it religion, education, politics or indeed war, degenerates into entertainment. Postman coined, among other things, the term „infotainment“ and lamented the resulting „infantilisation“ of society. Waters also visualised Postman’s theses on the album cover of „Amused to Death“. It shows an ape sitting in front of a television set, being stared at out of the screen by a giant eye.

The album itself opens with „The Ballad of Bill Hubbard“, which is more of an instrumental intro than a fully-fledged song. Woven into the piece is a segment from the British radio station BBC dating from 1991. In it Alf Razzell, a veteran of the First World War, describes how he finds his badly wounded comrade Bill Hubbard in the „no man’s land“ between the trenches and has to leave him behind to die. It is precisely to this dying soldier that Waters dedicated the album. Dedicated to Private William Hubbard (1888 bis 1917), Eighth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment can be read on the record sleeve.

Media Staging and Trivialisation

The thematic focus of „Amused to Death“, however, lies on the media staging and trivialisation of wars, which reached a new dimension with the second Gulf War in 1991. Back then several states, led by the USA, had allied against Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein, who had previously invaded the neighbouring state of Kuwait.

What was special at the time was that war was staged for the first time as a kind of television spectacle. Almost daily, US General Norman Schwarzkopf could be seen on the screens in camouflage, explaining the progress of the fighting. The viewer was thereby conveyed the illusion of a surgically precise conduct of war, in which remote-controlled guided weapons hit exclusively military targets and „collateral damage“ was avoided wherever possible. War thus took on the character of a video game.

Waters takes up precisely this live staging of war in the pieces „Perfect Sense“, which consists of two parts, and „The Bravery of Being Out of Range“. In „Perfect Sense“, for instance, one can hear the sports reporter Marv Albert – „The Voice of Basketball“, popular in the USA at the time – talking about acts of war as though they were a basketball game. The pieces „Late Home Tonight“ Part 1 and Part 2, on the other hand, are about the bombing of the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi by the USA in 1986. In them Waters describes, among other things, the everyday life of an American bomber pilot:

The beauty of military life. No questions, only orders and flight, only flight.

Focus on Social Criticism

The album also contains a few pieces where the focus lies more strongly on social criticism. In „What God Wants“, for example, Waters takes aim at the televangelists popular in the USA at the time. And in „The Miracle“ he accuses the British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, known among other things for „The Phantom of the Opera“, of writing musicals that merely lull people rather than prompting them to think. „You´re Watching TV“, in turn, is about the suppression of the Chinese democracy movement in 1989 on Tian’anmen Square in Beijing.

Even at 49 I have just as bleak a view of the world as I had at 17, he said at the time. As we know today, Waters’ view of the world had not changed some 30 years later at the age of 79 either. What has changed, however, is the social climate in Germany. Here an ever-narrowing corridor of acceptable opinion now means that Roger Waters has to fight in court for the right to voice his view of the world in public.