In 1985 the well known media researcher Neil Postman wrote the book ”Amusing ourselves to death”. The book – known probably to most of you – is concerned with how media and television has placed itself in the center of our collective consciousness. One of the main ideas in the book is that media is setting the scene on which all other events happen, and at the core of media and television is an element of entertainment. Hence, whatever is put on television must be defined as entertainment, no matter how brutal the murder or worrying the news displayed is. Credibility is a question of good editing, not truth. Reality is more a matter of what we think is happening, than factual events.
However, in 1992 Postman’s ideas was translated into music by none less than Roger Waters, former lead singer in Pink Floyd. Waters made the album “Amused to Death” and put Postman’s thoughts into music in a way that – at least by my standards – makes an outstanding album. Of course, we don’t need music to receive information, we get the idea when we read the book, we see the concepts that Postman is trying to show us, but put Waters’ CD on and just feel how is all suddenly makes a whole different sense! This is what we’re talking about, this is how media is portraying reality and contextualizing information in a language that we understand. What Waters is doing is visualizing – audiolizing – exactly what happens when one medium is replaced with another: the concepts is remediated, and the message is no longer the same. Ironically, it is the music that makes the book interesting; when reading the book again we start humming the tunes of Waters. Of course, Postman and Waters is obviously not saying the same thing – Postman is a researcher and Waters is selling records, still Postman recognizes Waters work in a later book of his, The End of Education: “There are, as we know, different levels of sensibility. In the case of music, for example, most American students are well tuned to respond with feeling, critical intelligence, and considerable attention to forms of popular music, but are not prepared to feel or even experience the music of Haydn, Bach, or Mozart; that is to say, their hearts are closed, or partially closed, to the canon of Western music. I am not about to launch into a screed against rock, metal, rap, and other forms of teenage music. In fact, readers should know that 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. Nor do I have the inclination for any other reason. Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude.”
Even if this is really not about being sensible to music, Waters production makes an impact on some of us unparalleled by the book by Postman. I’m not quite sure what makes the CD so good, the voice of Waters, the message he is conveying, or the “soundscape” in his music; it all plays together and makes me feel something. It makes me think differently, and for me, that is one of the main “side effects” of music.
Miraculous you call it babe,
You ain’t seen nothing yet,
They’ve got Pepsi in the Andes, McDonald’s in Tibet (…)
By the grace of God Almighty,
and the pressure of the marketplace,
The human race has civilized itself It’s a miracle
- Roger Waters
