Roger Waters' 'Death' & Rebirth

http://www.pink-floyd.org/artint/69.htm
Billboard Magazine (Late July 1992)

Why is it that sometimes you feel "Amused to Death?" What in the world can make you feel that way? What? Why? and how can that happen? In the article called "Roger Waters ''Death' & Rebirth." Written by Timothy White, it tells how "Amused to Death" became the most provocative and dazzling record of the 1990's. The founder and the compositor of this new LP is Roger Waters; the former chief compositor of Pink Floyd, and he started to work on it three years before Operation Desert Storm happened.

The main purpose of Timothy's article is to show Water's perspective about television and war, or live television transmissions of war, which is almost the same thing. For Waters, he thinks that this kind of news have become the principal mass entertainment. Inside his albums and lyrics we can find a variety of evidence that proves that he is correct. "There is nothing in the history of civilization that generates more profit for the power elite than war." Isn't that true?

In order to make this album, he had to use a 'metaphor.' The metaphor of a gorilla watching TV. The ape symbolizes anyone who is been sitting with his mouth open watching TV. Sounds familiar? That is something that we always do. He puts television as medicine, and gives a really good example of it. How the medicine, in this case television can be healing us or killing us; and he explains that is doing both things at the same time. "Healing us as target audience but killing off our respective cultures."

Waters says that thanks to television we only learned no more than we could see with our own eyes, which he qualifies it by "deliberate." He talked about how president Bush bought the election year idea of going to war against Iraq. A war that more than necessary is only a cheap and dishonest game show, that Mr. Bush wants to keep playing over and over; and everyone can see that.

The author states that "Amused to Death" is even better than the past Pink Floyd works. But in order to understand the meaning to it, one have to pay full attention to the record, so that every phrase would go into your brain. That if you hear this album more than once, you'll be hooked in perpetuity, that every scene that comes into your mind will invade your dreams. Spooky! Timothy says that the help of the band, has made the album sound terrific, enthralling and unforgettable for everyone.

One of the good things that Waters has experienced during the five years that took him to finish this album, is that he has learned to be more sensitive. His writings have become more passive, and he has being able to write more about individual experiences. One of those experiences is the death of his own father, a RAF Pilot during World War II. He calls this war a "wrenching waste." And I'm sure that many people feel the way he does about war.

I think that he's right by thinking that television is being a bad influence for everyone. We shouldn't let anyone and anything to think for us. But we're so fool that we let television to make us think the way its creators want, and to kill all of our prospectives, like he says. Is there something that we can do now? Or is it too late?