On ‘So’, Peter Gabriel unleashed an almighty stomp
The ex-Genesis bandleader was going to be a megastar, whether he liked it or not. He reached pop perfection 40 years ago today through relentless experimentation, spiritual anguish, and globe-spanning collaborations.
Peter Gabriel was once the mercurial theatre kid who ditched Genesis the moment he got bored. By 1985, he’d moved on to infuriating Geffen Records instead. The label had plenty of reason to believe Gabriel could be a commercial juggernaut: his ’77 debut spawned “Solsbury Hill,” Peter Gabriel 3: Melt topped the U.K. charts, and “Shock the Monkey” had given him an MTV presence. If Phil Collins’ rubbery synth piss-take “Sussudio” could dominate radio while Mike + The Mechanics kept charting hits, Gabriel seemed like a guaranteed star.
But Gabriel delighted in uncommercial ventures. He named every solo album Peter Gabriel, frustrating Geffen so much that the label retitled Peter Gabriel 4 as Security, and relentlessly tinkered with songs long after masters were turned in. Gabriel was obsessed with new music technology and saw himself as a budding ethnomusicologist. Nearly all of his collaborators have a story of the ex-Genesis leader trusting his process over deadlines. Critics adored the peculiarities. Geffen’s accountants did not.
“I’d had my fill of instrumental experimenting for a while, and I wanted to write proper pop songs, albeit on my own terms,” Gabriel later said. He initially wanted to title the album Good, at the label’s irritated expense. Instead, he, songwriting partner David Rhodes, and producer Daniel Lanois wore hard hats in the studio and outlined So, a cheeky, blue-collar poke at Geffen. The trio finished the album in a barn, though it’s impossible to imagine “Red Rain” being born anywhere except the inside of a cathedral.
Forty years ago this week, Gabriel opened So with a move of sheer confidence: beginning with the chorus. And “Red Rain”’s chorus is torrential and massive, like Gabriel is parting the seas just to sing. “Red Rain” is the grandest apocalypse song since “Gimme Shelter,” with nuclear war and the AIDS crisis looming over Gabriel the way Vietnam and race riots haunted the Rolling Stones. Nearly six minutes long, filled with shimmering, glissando piano chords, hushed, unnerving synths, and a bridge where Gabriel shouts himself hoarse, “Red Rain” is maximalist pop perfection.
Gabriel was one of the earliest adopters of synths and samplers with names that looked like math equations, but he was never beholden to them. The Richard Marx landfill that dominated the era’s pop charts was built by trend chasers and gimmick peddlers. So is an extremely 1986 album, but Gabriel’s fusion of synthetic and human is unique. Gabriel had a massive Rolodex of collaborators for So and knew that bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katche would be the heart of the record. Considering Levin was best known for playing the Chapman Stick—a contorted mass of strings masquerading as a bass—in King Crimson, his playing here is remarkably restrained, maybe the best of his career.
Katche, alongside assistance from Jerry Marotta and The Police’s Stewart Copeland, adds an entire character to the album. The first sound we hear on “Red Rain” is splattering hi-hats and, throughout, the percussion replicates thunderstorms, shattering glass, and church bells. Katche plays next to programmed drums, but his constant, insistent cymbals give an organic texture to So, best heard in the graceful groove “In Your Eyes” and the fluttering “That Voice Again.” His slippery, higher-register work makes the songs shimmer at the edges of Gabriel’s pleas. His remarkable restraint on the kick and his booming toms give them even more power when he does unleash an almighty stomp.
The one time Levin and Katche do throw down, it hits like a “Sledgehammer.” The karaoke classic was Gabriel’s version of an Otis Redding barnburner. Grabbing Stax Records’ Wayne Jackson for the wall of horns that bursts the song wide open moves it from pastiche to a love letter to the form. Other Motown classics are embedded in “Sledgehammer”’s DNA; the sheer need radiating from Gabriel’s gruff tenor recalls “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” further cemented by the call-and-response vocal outro. Levin’s bass is all the Temptations’ hot, roiling tension bundled into his fingers. But the rubbery funk of “Sledgehammer” shares more DNA with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ blocky R&B excellence.
“SLEDGEHAMMER” IS THE SOUND of an artist fully embracing his imperial phase. What else is “this is the new stuff / I go dancing in,” other than earned swagger? By the end of the song, with Katche ripping the bridge in half with an avalanching fill, Gabriel has no use for words; instead hollering a celebratory “yeah yeah yeah yeah!!!” AsStereogum’s Tom Breihan has proposed, “Sledgehammer” brings up some fascinating questions about Gabriel’s anatomy, considering the sex jam compares him to a bumper car, an airplane, and an entire constellation. So can feel like Gabriel’s own time wandering the desert, beset by temptation and grief.
This does lead to the extreme tonal whiplash of the first three songs. End times supplication, plastic pop stomp, then pure dejection tinged with radiant hope. “Don’t Give Up,” underpinned by a haunting, echoing bassline from Levin, had Gabriel connecting the crushing policies of Margaret Thatcher to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. He smartly avoids specifics, “In this proud land / We grew up strong / We were wanted all along / I was taught to fight, taught to win.” It could be Chobham, Boston, Rio, or Lusaka. The story of men taught that work is the only thing that makes them worthy is brutally universal. Kate Bush appears on each chorus like a guardian angel, singing the title and revealing that her sense of empathy as her greatest strength.
From the introspection of “Running Up That Hill (Deal with God)” to the high Russian drama of “Babooshka,” every character Bush inhabited or created was granted a full, human, flawed set of values and histories. In “Don’t Give Up,” she uses that power to become a ray of light, the first glimmering of the sun through absolute darkness. When Gabriel joins her, he’s not as sure as she is, but realizes he must shake himself from malaise. He brilliantly cuts his final verse in half. Nothing is solved, but he is attempting to be comfortable in the dusk and allowing Bush, her kindness, to have the last words.
The sequencing points to one of So’s central oddities: is there even a defined version of the album? The two outliers on So, “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” and “This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds),” closed different versions of the record. The obvious closer, “In Your Eyes”, was shifted up to start side B on record due to arcane vinyl limitations on Levin’s bass that Gabriel and maybe three other pop stars on Earth were aware of.
“We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” is a welcome enough break from So’s maximalism. It’s an eerie, proto-trip-hop song, nearly instrumental, threaded with a Massive Attack-esque keyboard line. The song was based on a remarkably cruel psychological test about how willingly people obey authority while harming others. Though when the vocals do come in, there’s an unfortunate tinge of “we don’t need no education” applied to subject matter so callous.
“This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds),” meanwhile, is a baffling pick for a closer, as it wasn’t even written for So. It was a collaboration between Gabriel and Laurie Anderson and, frankly, seems like more of an Anderson solo song with Gabriel as a featured guest. It never clicks. Still, the cluttered percussion and lava lamp synths are welcomingly reminiscent of the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind soundtrack.
But both songs underpin the true thematic throughline of So. It’s easy enough to chalk up the drama to Gabriel’s dissolving marriage or his discomfort with the pop world. But So is the sound of a man in the grips of a spiritual crisis. That’s obvious with “In Your Eyes,” Gabriel playing with an African folk tradition of love songs that could be about a partner or about perfection within the love of God. And the album opens with scenes from the great flood. So’s most devastating moment comes from “Red Rain”’s bridge, Gabriel’s voice catching as the music falls away and he sings “I come to you, defenses down / With the trust of a child.” There is a profound brokenness in his soul as his gruff tenor fails. He’s begging for reassurance in the torrent.
Side-A closer “That Voice Again” purposefully muddies its meaning, flitting between keys on the verse and chorus, creating an uneasy, sea-sick feeling. Rhodes said the song was about “the parental voice in our heads that either helps or defeats us,” fitting with Gabriel’s exploration of authority throughout So. Gabriel strains to sing “I want you close, I want you near / I can’t help but listen, but I don’t wanna hear,” a plea and a warning to a partner, a parent, or God. The sheer force rattling through Gabriel’s voice feels biblical. Gabriel unleashes a searing, forlorn scream on the bridge, directed to the void and matching its all-encompassing intensity.
“Big Time,” another Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis pastiche, is a condemnation of consumer religion. It was a distrustful, loathing look at the shimmering commercialism of the late ‘80s, the inverse of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” Also, a power move by Gabriel, taking the synthetic, blocky funk that Collins had made inescapable and making the plastic compelling. “And my heaven will be a big heaven / And I will walk through the front door,” Gabriel snarls, embodying the cynical and clinical American Psycho ambition. Paired with the earned paranoia of “Milgram’s 37” and the electronic mysticism of “Excellent Birds,” So shows a deepening distrust of any authority from record label to God on his throne.
But So isn’t just shirt-rending Jobian shouts. “Mercy Street” radiates soft, hushed kindness. Based on the poetry of Anne Sexton, Gabriel’s double-tracked vocals turn him into Charon, guiding Sexton through the Styx. “Mercy Street” paints oblivion as a welcome escape from the trials of a tumultuous life, long-sought rest finally granted. Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa’s chiming work fills the song with mist and fluttering spirits, hovering at the edge of earshot. “Anne, with her father, is out in the boat / Riding the water, riding the waves on the sea,” Gabriel sings to close the song, Avalon on the horizon. He was only a year away from starting the soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that would allow him to explore more of his Worldbeat excursions with a dark, instrumental bent mirroring Dead Can Dance.
BUT IF THERE IS A REDEMPTION, it’s “In Your Eyes.” The song must close the album, because it transforms So’s spiritual wrangling into loving rapture. On “Don’t Give Up,” Gabriel could never rouse the hope Bush offered. In “That Voice Again,” Gabriel briefly found comfort in limbo: “It’s only in uncertainty / That we’re naked and alive,” but in “In Your Eyes,” Gabriel fully steps into the light.
Levin and Katche are the bedrock. Katche’s melodic playing creates a swirling morass of hooks, where each section of “In Your Eyes” could have been sampled for its own stadium anthem. “All my instincts, they return / The grand façade, so soon will burn,” Gabriel sings as Levin’s bass pulls him forward. In the eyes of his lover, his god, his collaborators, he is encouraged to make himself better. Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour carries the song to its elated end, Gabriel’s intent of making the song’s universal vision of love come true by translating the chorus into Wolof.
So would become a commercial juggernaut and partially create the nebulous and unhelpful “Worldbeat” genre. While Sting and other “retail Gabriels” made the musical equivalent of an exchange student, insisting they suddenly knew how to pronounce “Barcelona.” Gabriel’s musical globe trekking was genuine. He was inviting collaborators in, seeing them as equals rather than genres to pilfer from.
It’s hard to imagine another pop star learning Xhosa for “Biko,” or writing an anti-apartheid song in the first place. Gabriel, with his tireless activism that continues to this day, worked relentlessly to make sure artists who would never get a second look from Western labels got a fair shake. Three years later, Gabriel would form Real World Records, ensuring artists like Congolese legend Papa Wemba would have access to studios, session work, and press.
The sentiment below the righteousness is Gabriel’s love affair with songwriting itself. He’s one of the few elder statesmen in active conversation with new artists. His covers album Scratch My Back had Gabriel paying tribute to The Magnetic Fields, Radiohead, Regina Spektor, and Bon Iver. Funniest of all was, 22 years after So, Vampire Weekend would namecheck Gabriel as an insolent nod to their own gleeful larceny of African rhythms and hooks. In one of the oddest and most magnanimous collabs since Michael McDonald popped up on a Grizzly Bear record, Gabriel re-recorded “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” with Hot Chip. He switched the lyrics “This feels so unnatural / Peter Gabriel, too” barely containing a bemused smile as he sang “it feels so unnatural / To sing your own name.”
“I haven’t quite worked that out whether I should be doing that or substituting it with a name that might be appropriate to me—I think playing with yourself makes you go blind after a while,” he said, surely giggling.
As Vampire Weekend’s debut approaches its twentieth anniversary, we’ve reached a third generation of artists inspired by So. Yeasayer’s acid-covered odyssey Odd Blood recreated Gabriel’s left-field pop perfection, even hiring some of his old studio buddies for the following tour. His most paranoid acolytes, Mancunian freaks Everything Everything, have fused paranoia and hooks through Gabriel’s guidance alongside modern mystics like Caroline Polachek, who created her own spiritual sequel to “In Your Eyes” with “Blood and Butter.”
However, the original “In Your Eyes” isn’t even the best version. Secret World Live’s recording is hallucinatory, joyous, cynicism-shattering, eleven-plus minutes long, and finally captures Gabriel’s original concept. Katche and Levin are in a fugue state, the rattling drums and sliding bass warm and grateful. Gabriel’s voice nearly cracks every time he sings “without my pride,” the desperation of “Red Rain” now transformed into surrender. Berklee vocalist Paula Cole, Indian violinist L. Shankar, French-Armenian percussionist Levon Minassian, Wemba, and essentially everyone else on So appear. During the ecstatic closing jam, Cole, Gabriel, Wemba, and Shankar weave together wordlessly; Wemba’s piercing cry becomes a globe-spanning call to prayer. This was the closest Peter Gabriel ever came to creating his utopian vision of worship music, finding totality in collaboration. It’s a dream of a world we may yet reach. And we go dancing in.
Watch Peter Gabriel perform “Sledgehammer” and “Red Rain” at Woodstock 94 below.
