Like David Byrne and Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel fell hard for world music. Unlike his fellow aesthetes, Gabriel is afflicted with terminal cases of both gravitas and bombast. The former Genesis front man may have injected that band’s music with a degree of absurdist levity (at least live) uncommon in a genre, progressive rock, not known for its sense of humor, but the same can’t be said for his solo material. He’s one serious individual, our Peter, and his music is suitably ponderous. It’s not light on its feet and rarely makes you want to dance. It can’t. Peter Gabriel’s oeuvre has a serious weight problem. In his case that “art” in “art rock” weighs a ton.
Oh, he’s had his moments. Songs like “Solsbury Hill” and “Games Without Frontiers” were light of foot. But he’s English and he’s earnest (he put away childish things with Genesis) and he’s very much a product of progressive rock, a genre afflicted with a fatal case of pomposity. Further, his take on world music has always had a calculated feel to it–as The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau noted bluntly of his 1982 LP Security, “Self-conscious primitivism hasn’t cured his grandiosity,” although I for one don’t detect the primitivism. The percussion trimmings, sure, but the man’s a classic rarified product of advanced Western Civilization, and definitely of that breed of musical explorers who wouldn’t venture into the jungles of sound without porters and a thunderbox.
And to make matters worse Gabriel has a social conscience—which is laudable, of course, but hardly gives his music bounce or, God help us, lends it a sense of humor. Caring deeply about the state of the world is a burden, added gravity as it were, and gravity is a heavy proposition—it keeps things down, not up. All of which means the joys of world music are beyond him, and the last thing I would call his music (and this isn’t the case with the best of Byrne and Simon) is joyous.
And so it goes with Gabriel’s 1986 less-than-zero excitement LP So. It’s not an entirely humorless affair and takes a few faltering dance steps, but for the most part it’s an immaculately produced and richly textured lumbering slab (the right word exactly) of vinyl. Gabriel has about as much Motown in him as Oliver Cromwell, and the LP’s production, arrangements, and cast of thousands (Cecil B. DeMille would be jealous!) invariably add pounds to the songs. Even the numbers you might dance to in theory wear concrete overshoes.
The LP’s songs are percussion heavy, but all that drum drum drumming doesn’t add life to the proceedings—it simply adds more texture to an album that is all texture. And you get percussion galore on “Red Rain.” The drums pound down like a hard rain and Gabriel is so, so earnest, but the synthesizer flourishes are too bright and very much a product of their synthed-up time. In short it’s a pop song in art drag, and a real drag of a pop song at that.
The big horn section on “Sledgehammer” chippers things up and is meant to give the song a funky soul vibe, but it’s a clumsy, lumbering beast and (impossible as it seems) has even less soul than James Taylor’s song of the same name. It could have been expressly written for a dance therapy class for people with wooden legs, and speaking solely for myself I’d sooner work myself to the bone using a sledgehammer to smash big rocks into tiny rocks on a chain gang than listen to it. I count it as one of the small pleasures of my life when I’m afforded the opportunity to twist the radio dial when it comes on.
“Don’t Give Up” is a glorified art rock power ballad and duet with Kate Bush, AKA your average uppity listener’s Patty Smyth. Kate’s intolerably inspirational, Peter sounds down in the mouth, and it’s a (very) small mercy when it ends and you’re treated to the sparkly synthesizer introduction to the all-dressed-up pop dreck that is “That Voice Again.” What I hear when I listen to it is Phil Collins putting on airs—the elaborate arrangement and lofty production values of Gabriel and co-producer, the perpetual overachiever, Daniel Lanois (whose motto should be “Everything Daniel Lanois touches turns into Daniel Lanois”) give the song an aura of hyper-sophisticated self-importance poor, much-derided Phil (who say what you will about the guy, he has an endearing sense of humility) would never dare attempt.
The slow and dreamlike “Mercy Street” sets an English folk melody to a Forró beat and features lyrics about the late American poet Anne Sexton. Peter sings in a hush, wouldn’t want to wake the dead poet, and he would obviously prefer not to wake me either. It’s the perfect soporific and might revolutionize sleep aids if it came in pill form, and fortunately it’s followed by the rise and shine of “Big Time.” It’s about escaping a small town and I can relate—I guarantee my small town is smaller than your small town—and Frank Sinatra could most certainly relate as well, even if John Mellencamp can’t.
It’s funky enough, I suppose, should you happen to suffer from a funk impairment, otherwise it’s just more classy radio fare, and the only thing I truly like about it is the part where Gabriel sings about how the people in his small town use small words (maybe multi-syllabic ones are violations of a local ordinance) but he isn’t having it because “he’s smarter than that.” Fortunately he has a plan: “I’ve been stretching my mouth/To let those big words come right out.” A bit of humor, thank God, but what I want to know is what mouth-stretching technique he’s using. There’s the Bruner Method, of course, although I just made that up. It’s more likely he’s just been gargling tennis balls.
“We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” is another insufferable drag with a bright synthesizer note set against a steady crawl of a drum beat. A choir comes in singing “We do what we’re told” over and over which makes sense because the song’s subject is the infamous Milgram Experiment, which was basically a depressing game of “Shock the Monkey” for humans. Gabriel sounds all bummed out about the sad truth it revealed about the conformity of human beings and our capacity for doing horrible things to one another, and as a result our innate inclination is to follow orders, not that Milgram told us anything we didn’t already know. The problem is Peter himself could use a shock to lively up himself, because his vocals depress me even more than human beings’ happy willingness to do horrible things to one another.
The repetitive and funky (with a very small “f”) “This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)”—which didn’t appear on vinyl until 2002—features both loads of percussion (nothing unusual there, we’re talking about world music here) and art rock Queen Laurie Anderson on synthesizer and vocals. For the most part she’s the response to Gabriel’s call, and having the two of them together is a meeting of smarty-pants avant garde minds of the sort that bores me silly. It features that same small pipe-like sound you hear on the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” while the lyrics have the same “stop making sense” feel as those in the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” but Gabriel’s song doesn’t share the Heads’ song’s joyous groove or sense of bewilderment and mystery—Peter and Laurie just sort of go on and on, and I’m not inclined to wonder what it is they’re not making sense about.
“In Your Eyes” was another late arrival (2002 again) and features lots of backing vocalists intoning the title and providing general wail and hubbub, but surprisingly the song doesn’t offend my delicate intestinal sensibilities, perhaps because for once it unites the LP’s grandiose textural ambitions with a melody that boasts just enough life and kick to keep me interested, or at least conscious. Which shouldn’t distract from the fact that I turn it off when it comes on the radio. There’s an old Russian saying dating back to World War II that goes, “Your German may be a nice enough fellow, but it’s safer just to shoot him.” I employ the same philosophy to the songs on So.
So is so-so at best and a big so what at that—a leaden bore I wouldn’t want to have fall on my foot. Gabriel’s an arty elitist whose populist gestures—I’m talking “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time”—don’t change the fact that you can take the guy out of prog but you can’t take the prog out of the guy. The dour sophistication and oh so meticulous billion $ production values of So remind me why punk had to be invented–they made giving music a good punch in the kisser an existential necessity.
But you can’t keep the smart and fussy down, and to quote David Byrne, who with the help of Brian Eno looted the world music treasure chest to produce exciting and truly boundary-pushing sounds, music’s self-conscious hubris factor is (and will always be) the “same as it always was.” For Gabriel, world music is so much window dressing for dreary mid-tempo threnodies that can only be called “avant middle of the road.” So is stodgy, hopelessly elitist, conservative stuff, and should make you reach for your sledgehammer.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
