  The following review appeared in the Sunday, September 13, Los
Angeles Times Calendar (entertainment) section.  

--begin review--------------------------------------------------------

                          **1/2 [see below]
                            Roger Waters
                          "Amused to Death"
                              Columbia

  The last utterance in this 72-minute opus is 1984, and Waters'
thought-provoking, sonically ambitious album owes an immense debt to
that great dystopian novel.  Like George Orwell, Waters envisions a
society in which endless war, incessant video and a fanatical civil
religion enforce conformity.  Water's new wrinkle is that this
conformity isn't coerced but seduced:  no need for Big Brother to be
watching when the minds to be controlled are already tamed -- "amused
to death" -- by their own addiction to watching.
  What's missing, and critically needed, is a central figure to carry
Waters' ideas and shape a story -- what the Winston Smith character
did for Orwell, and what the Pink character did for Waters' own Pink
Floyd-era dystopia of the mind, "The Wall".  The result is blurred
structure (partly improved by the moving old-soldier's tale Waters
uses as a framing device), too much repetition and a certain distance
and overintellectualization.
  Waters does bridge that distance in peak moments, notably with the
heated funk of "What God Wants, Part I" (a musical heir to "Another
Brick in the Wall") and the Dylan-folk of "Watching TV", which melds
bitter ironies with deep, wounded feeling.  But overall there's a
dearth of the good old pop-rock appeal that always lifted the better
Pink Floyd records.
  It's not the first time that Waters the rock-opera-tor has gotten
bogged down in an overabundance of the recitative needed to outline
his ideas, while failing to deliver the arias that could bring those
ideas to their emotional point.  All of which makes "Amused to Death"
more rewarding to think about than to listen to.
--Mike Boehm

[Note] New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars
(fair), three stars (good), and four stars (excellent).

--end review----------------------------------------------------------

  A couple of my comments for your consideration:

* In the answer to the first question, Roger says _when [television]
  is a tool ... to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is
  the god that we should all bow down to ..._.  I had always viewed
  the god in _What God Wants_ as the absolute God, but could it
  perhaps be the free market god he refers to?  What [the free market]
  wants, [the free market] gets. (???)

* Roger hints about maybe doing something with acoustic guitar.  I
  wonder if he was contacted by MTV about doing an _Unplugged_ show.
  One can only hope...

* In the review, Boehm says that the album is like an outline of a
  plot without the story to realize it.  I have found the album a
  little slow and lacking direction as well, and I think that it could
  be because there is no real story with climaxes, etc., but rather
  just a collection of ideas.  There's nothing wrong with that in and
  of itself, but the album might have had more impact with a more
  concrete story line.  But overall I'd up it to three stars on the
  L.A. Times scale.
