Amused To Death

Amused to Death is a concept album, and the third studio album by former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters. It was released in 1992.

The album title was attached to material that Waters began working on during the Radio KAOS tour. A prototype album cover was reportedly distributed to his record company, which included caricatures of three figures resembling David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, floating in a martini glass. However, it was several years before the album was finally released (Roger refused to release it as long as his former bandmates were still on Columbia Records’ roster), and it is unknown how much the material was changed in the interim. At the very least, the songs criticising the first Gulf War, President Bush, and Tiananmen Square were new or heavily rewritten, as those events occurred after the original writing.

In Neil Postman’s book The End of Education, he remarks on the album: “(…) Roger Waters, once the lead singer of Pink Floyd, was sufficiently inspired by a book of mine to produce a CD called Amused to Death. This fact so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position to repudiate him or his kind of music.”

Waters stated in an interview with Rockline on 8 February 1993 that he wanted to use samples of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey on the album.