65 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
65 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
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The following review appeared in the Sunday, September 13, Los
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Angeles Times Calendar (entertainment) section.
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--begin review--------------------------------------------------------
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**1/2 [see below]
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Roger Waters
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"Amused to Death"
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Columbia
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The last utterance in this 72-minute opus is 1984, and Waters'
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thought-provoking, sonically ambitious album owes an immense debt to
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that great dystopian novel. Like George Orwell, Waters envisions a
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society in which endless war, incessant video and a fanatical civil
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religion enforce conformity. Water's new wrinkle is that this
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conformity isn't coerced but seduced: no need for Big Brother to be
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watching when the minds to be controlled are already tamed -- "amused
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to death" -- by their own addiction to watching.
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What's missing, and critically needed, is a central figure to carry
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Waters' ideas and shape a story -- what the Winston Smith character
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did for Orwell, and what the Pink character did for Waters' own Pink
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Floyd-era dystopia of the mind, "The Wall". The result is blurred
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structure (partly improved by the moving old-soldier's tale Waters
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uses as a framing device), too much repetition and a certain distance
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and overintellectualization.
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Waters does bridge that distance in peak moments, notably with the
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heated funk of "What God Wants, Part I" (a musical heir to "Another
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Brick in the Wall") and the Dylan-folk of "Watching TV", which melds
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bitter ironies with deep, wounded feeling. But overall there's a
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dearth of the good old pop-rock appeal that always lifted the better
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Pink Floyd records.
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It's not the first time that Waters the rock-opera-tor has gotten
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bogged down in an overabundance of the recitative needed to outline
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his ideas, while failing to deliver the arias that could bring those
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ideas to their emotional point. All of which makes "Amused to Death"
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more rewarding to think about than to listen to.
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--Mike Boehm
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[Note] New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars
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(fair), three stars (good), and four stars (excellent).
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--end review----------------------------------------------------------
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A couple of my comments for your consideration:
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* In the answer to the first question, Roger says _when [television]
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is a tool ... to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is
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the god that we should all bow down to ..._. I had always viewed
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the god in _What God Wants_ as the absolute God, but could it
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perhaps be the free market god he refers to? What [the free market]
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wants, [the free market] gets. (???)
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* Roger hints about maybe doing something with acoustic guitar. I
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wonder if he was contacted by MTV about doing an _Unplugged_ show.
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One can only hope...
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* In the review, Boehm says that the album is like an outline of a
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plot without the story to realize it. I have found the album a
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little slow and lacking direction as well, and I think that it could
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be because there is no real story with climaxes, etc., but rather
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just a collection of ideas. There's nothing wrong with that in and
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of itself, but the album might have had more impact with a more
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concrete story line. But overall I'd up it to three stars on the
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L.A. Times scale.
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