I Feel the Power: A Review of Peter Gabriel's So, 38 Years On

Why don't you call my name?

Youth is a kind of gated wasteland. It is relentlessly and exclusively beguiling, overflowing with promise and hope confined to “your better years”, but kicking down the doors often reveals adulthood’s tepid, featureless land in another color. Thankfully, the wasteland is often impermanent and our journeys through its unforgiving wilderness are sometimes undertaken in good company. This duality of younger days as both miserable and romantic crystallizes in not only many discographies but also our assignation of intense significance to certain numbers in the late teens.

For me, this number was eighteen, though the occasion was hardly momentous. There was some champagne, some well-meaning advice on the tribulations to come and some embarrassingly unfiltered dancing after the bottle was drained. As sentimental teenagers often do, I looked back on the generally banal mediocrity of years gone by and grimly pondered what I could realistically look forward to: seeing some movies in theatres, finding love (or not), learning to drive. In this review of the past and forecast of the future, I imagined the only constant would be music. After all, music had buoyed me through the examinable darkness of an unrelentingly stressful education and lent light to the handful of happiness that I could recall. As long as it did not cease to exist, and I refused to yield to time’s ossification of curiosity, I could count on something to lean on.

At some point, I realized that despite the weight of this revelation and my music taste resembling that of a sixty-something art history professor, I was still young. Begrudgingly, I opened Spotify and was bemused to find that the app was enabling my incessant nostalgia through its inaugural Wrapped feature. With an impatience truly becoming of my age, I swiped through the extraneous nonsense and got to the important bit: witnessing my year in music by the numbers. Surprisingly, in the climactic crescendo of youth’s final bugle horns, So, a record I had only listened to that year after thinking “Solsbury Hill” was nifty, a record whose singer and chief songwriter Peter Gabriel previously only existed as an icon of progressive rock in my mind, a record seemingly divorced from being young, was my album of the year. What was even more surprising was that somehow, it made - and continues to make - sense. So is a compelling statement that is equal parts transcendent and grounded, and a perfect essentialization of the elements that composed the 80s, and by extension, my youth.

I would be remiss not to begin touring So without mentioning the reasons most people sign up for the adventure. Dazzlingly promiscuous and sickeningly groovy, “Sledgehammer” swaggered into the cultural zeitgeist in 1986 thanks to its pastiche-adjacent official video which holds the once-enviable honor of being the most played video on MTV. While Gabriel grunts and wastes no time spelling out the nature of his desire (“you could have a steam train/If you just lay down your tracks”), each hit of the snare drum amasses a colossal gravity barely held together by bass work that seemingly conversational basslines, courtesy of the inimitable Tony Levin. Unlike much of the music surrounding it, “Sledgehammer” borrows from a school of cool a la Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, resembling an R&B shouter in its largely synthesizer-free composition and enormous horn section.

The only other remotely comparable tune is “Big Time”, which bothers to find the switch for the synths but remains inextricably wedded to soul. If “Sledgehammer” posited sexuality, “Big Time” reverts into the sexless through occasionally biting satire (“and my heaven will be a big heaven/And I will walk through the front door”) mixed with lame, cliched admissions of the shallowness of fame. Many critics view the tackiness of “Big Time” as a fault, though I interpret it as irony stacked on irony: a song lamenting a materialistic industry features alarmingly straightforward commentary in a discography known for its metaphors and twists of phrase, almost as though it were designed to make a splash on the Hot 100. Where the angle of attack is indisputably effective is “That Voice Again”, in which a bright instrumental obscures themes of betrayal and vulnerability gone astray (“I can get so scared/Listen to the wind”). Despite its mature themes and the soaring passion of Gabriel’s vocal performance, the song is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps given away by its arresting groove and its kitschy synth lead.

The rest of So generally aligns with our expectations of the former progressive rock frontman. “Red Rain”, which opens the album, drowns in reverb-laden pads and drums, reckoning and possibly making peace with death - there is still some grace in “bathing in red rain” - in an era defined by humanitarian crises, from the AIDS epidemic to famines in Ethiopia. It negotiates this macabre subject through tethering itself to a rhythm section littered with hi-hats played by The Police’s Stewart Copeland over an understated bassline before breaking free from even this connection in its final moments, which feature nothing but spare guitar, brooding synthesizer and Gabriel’s scratchy, raw vocal. “Mercy Street” stirs the same pot, with lyrics referencing an indeterminate space inspired by an Anne Sexton poem. But there is a clear object of yearning here: “in your daddy’s arms again […] looking for mercy”. For us, the unembraced, we have the warmth of Gabriel’s falsetto set against electronic instrumentation and low-toned bass capable of inducing vibrations even in dreams. The vocal performance is Gabriel’s finest on the album, seeing him reach for the furthest notes while never assuming a power that would flatten the rest of the song.

In a different flavor, “Don’t Give Up” picks the equally topical unemployment crisis which afflicted much of Thatcher-era Britain as the background to a chronicle of insecurity and the failures of masculinity that transitions to genuine hope and redemption. There is an earnestness to the lyric here that seems almost too intimate. Even as the chorus repeats platitudes (“you’re not the only one”/“you still have us”/“somewhere there’s a place where we belong”) it is strangely comforting, in no small part thanks to Kate Bush’s ethereal presence on the microphone. The song is stripped, with Levin’s bass and occasional movement around the drums filling an otherwise crushing silence. It solely gains momentum in the bridge where keyboards make a brief entrance before returning to healing the damned in its final act. Songs that successfully assuage fear without devolving into cliche are few and far between, and somehow, “Don’t Give Up” pulls it off.

To remind us that this is still Gabriel, So features two short, characteristically obtuse oddities towards the end: “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” and “This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)”. The former is a nod to an infamous psychological experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram, where participants were told to administer electric shocks to a “learner” by an authority figure. In one variant, 37 out of 40 participants continued shocking the “learner”, giving rise to the song’s title. The song itself is an admonishment of obedience to the point of ludicrousness, and a reminder that Gabriel is a staunch advocate for human rights who did also make “Biko”. The message is far more nebulous in the latter, though it presumably deals with the signifier in relation to the signified (“I see pictures of people” as opposed to “I see people”) and seems to draw from Gabriel’s heyday of angular progressive art rock. It might have been a fitting end to So, but there is one more song left on the album.

Most depictions of love in the 80s were unbearably sappy. For every “Time After Time” or “With or Without You” we had, there were an equal number of cheesy, unimpressive REO Speedwagon or Chicago songs to ingratiate us. Love was hardly ever more than interpersonal, even in the most memorable pop music of the time. When the popular music of the 80s did capture the cosmic, it could never balance its treatment of grander designs with that of love. Some songs did come close - Carly Simon’s “Coming Around Again” comes to mind - but even they remained too tethered to the real world even though love deserved the heavens.

All of this is to say that way before the boombox, “In Your Eyes” was not only unusual for Gabriel but also for the prevailing conventions of describing love in the midst of that neon-lit excess. But it worked, and it continues to be a musical and lyrical blueprint for surrendering (“and the grand facade so soon will burn”) to love, and not merely a love that is reserved for another person. Through religious images (“I see the doorway to a thousand churches”) Gabriel elevates love from the earthly plane to the celestial with the metaphysical nuance of a Renaissance poet. Writing a line like “without a noise, without my pride/I reach out from the inside” would have been herculean for anyone who had not dissolved their ego in the psychedelic haze of the 60s, let alone for somebody as transparently arrogant as Gabriel. It is spare, it is romantic, it is gorgeous. If the rest of So merely gestures towards world music, “In Your Eyes” fully embraces it through a drum part that features African instrumentation and Youssou N’Dour’s stunning, uninhibited vocal towards the end of the track, a mixture which swirls in pristine ambience artfully provided by synth pads, universalizing the love within the song’s boundaries. Quite simply, it is the ultimate love song of the 80s. In my mind, nothing else really comes close.

Two years have passed since I first heard So. Its sometimes profane, sometimes larger-than-life themes have stuck with me through clear weather and turbulence. There are few albums as capable of composing a portrait of fractured identity, veering between the bright pastel colors of “Sledgehammer” to the earthy tones of “In Your Eyes” or “Red Rain”. Though being young is never once mentioned on the album, for me it miraculously symbolizes youth in all its mistaken bravado, in all its desolation, in all its unguardedness. However, I can never imagine aging out of it. If anything, I figure that time will coat So with a patina of sorts, and with some luck, a part of me will always be young enough to fall for its charms.

P.S. sorry about the erratic posting schedule, I’ve been traveling on and off for the past two weeks. Hope you enjoyed this review! It’s been a long time coming. Also, happy holidays to everyone!