1) The Ballad Of Bill Hubbard; 2) What God Wants, Pt. 1; 3) Perfect Sense, Pt. 1; 4) Perfect Sense, Pt. 2; 5) The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range; 6) Late Home Tonight, Pt. 1; 7) Late Home Tonight, Pt. 2; 8) Too Much Rope; 9) What God Wants, Pt. 2; 10) What God Wants, Pt. 3; 11) Watching TV; 12) Three Wishes; 13) It's A Miracle; 14) Amused To Death.
General verdict: Conceptually solid, but musically dissatisfying — just a 70-minute lesson, delivered in lite-Floydian, that teaches you to learn to hate your TV
I suppose that on some sort of
pretend-to-be-objective scale, Amused To
Death should rigidly count as Roger Waters' best solo album. Long, witty,
walking a reasonably thin line between crude political banality and astute
social philosophy, well-produced, stocked with recurrent leitmotifs, wisely
utilising its session players, ending on a sour, but sentimental note — this is
like all the good sides of both Pros And
Cons and Radio K.A.O.S. brought
together and stripped of their accompanying ugliness, such as the ridiculous
concept of the former and the Godawful production values of the latter.
Even so, Amused
To Death remains a fairly tedious listen. By the early 1990s, baby boomer
geniuses were beginning to come out of their middle age crises and to rise
above weird industry demands of the Eighties — Roger was no exception to the
rule, and he finally came out with a record where his artistic/intellectual
personality overcame the layers of silliness and technophilia, and his message
to the world could finally be taken more or less seriously. However, as a side
effect, that same personality also overrode the musical component. While
neither the melodies nor the arrangements for these melodies could clearly be
labeled «bad», nothing here reminds of the classic Floyd sonic inventiveness. Most
of the time, Waters simply relies on stock-owned blues-rock and folk-rock
phrasing, sometimes to the point of inadvertently ripping off a classic (ʽThe
Bravery Of Being Out Of Rangeʼ, for instance, takes its chorus directly from
Dylan's ʽIt's All Over Now, Baby Blueʼ, without batting an eye).
Naturally, I am not supporting this claim with
any serious musicological analysis, but something tells me Roger himself would not
mind — recycling traditional musical structures was hardly a sin for him here
as long as it would serve a greater good, namely, functioning as the background
for a long and winding story about the detrimental influence of the media on
each of us as individuals and on humanity as a whole. Not a tremendously
original idea, for sure, but one that a rock poet of Roger's caliber could, at
least in theory, realize sharply and deeply, with all that experience behind
his back; and if you throw in tasteful production and some first-rate musical
guests in the studio (like Jeff Beck — probably a welcome change for all the
hip people who prefer him over Eric Clapton), your chances go through the roof.
Unfortunately, Amused To Death works better as a collection of rock poetry than a
thrilling musical experience. Seventy minutes of music, mostly consisting of
slow, ponderous, drearily advancing melodies with a knack for New Age and
lite-jazz trappings — musically appealing about as much as late period Camel
albums. Energy appears only sporadically and mostly in the form of rather
leaden and pompous arena-rock, like the already mentioned ʽBraveryʼ and particularly
ʽWhat God Wantsʼ, the album's centerpiece that Roger liked so much that he
reprised it as ʽPart 2ʼ and then wrote a completely different song and called
it ʽPart 3ʼ (but nobody noticed anyway). For everything else, you have to rely
on the magic of the voice, the words, and the sonic gloominess, which the man
still provides in spades by means of bass notes, echoes, whispers, synthesized
textures, and just the subconscious understanding that if you are listening to
Roger Waters, you have to be prepared for sonic gloom at all times anyway.
Any serious review of the album will
concentrate on the concept, whose sprawling realization will give you plenty of
points to latch on to — like, for instance, praising the man for that bittersweet
obituary for an anonymous girl dying in Tiananmen Square (ʽWatching TVʼ), or chiding
the man for an undeservedly vicious swipe at Andrew Lloyd Webber on ʽIt's A Miracleʼ
(come on Roger, is Phantom Of The Opera
really that much worse than Ça Ira?), or reflecting on the continuing
relevance of "the shelf life of a teenage queen" from the title
track. But this is not a serious review, and if there is one thing that its
author is really confused about, it is the reason why all this depth and
tastefulness never awakens the same kind of emotional response that something
like The Wall always does — even if,
let's face it, Roger's social reflections here are significantly more mature
than the simplistic-clichéd portrayal of Mr. Pink.
To put it shortly, if the first thing that a
warning against amusing ourselves to death does to us is bore us to death, it is not a good sign. I agree with some of
Roger's views and disagree with others, but I would gladly listen to the most
outrageous outbursts of ultra-leftist propaganda on his part, were they to be
delivered with the energy and creativity of classic Floyd. The worst thing
about Amused To Death is that this
is a record that should supposedly be brimming with anger and bursting with
sorrow, but not a single second of it actually made me feel angry or sad —
well, except for being angry at having wasted so much time and sad that quite a
solid bunch of really good lyrics went to waste. And it is still Roger Waters' best solo album.