Peter Gabriel is Okay! And That's Bad!

To paraphrase myself, the only thing worse than a bad album is an okay one. Of course, Peter Gabriel is a musical artist of more substance than, say, Sha Na Na or Burt Reynolds, to choose two recent horrors I've accessed via Apple Music. But where Sha Na Na enrage me and Reynolds's sole album makes me guffaw, Gabriel's discography hangs in the air moist with solid intentions, waiting for you to honor it. Plenty of music lovers have honored it such that it compels you to wrestle with the oeuvre. But for me, despite the occasional arresting moment or even entire song, the music remains suspended in mid-air, rarely traveling down my auditory canal and into my musical memory hole. Across a discography, such inoffensive ambience soon becomes irritating and that's when okay shades into bad.

The bland masala of Gabriel's oeuvre derives in part from a neutralizing of source genres. No authenticity queen, I get itchy invoking a genre purity that doesn't exist. Nevertheless, on the first four self-titled albums, it sounds as if Gabriel aimed to prog out within tighter new wave and post-punk structures but failed to achieve the highs in any of the respective genres.* That's why I'm constantly longing for something with more foreground spritz, something punkier or funkier and just weirder, when listening. 1978's "D.I.Y." may have been his tribute to (parody of?) punk. To the extent that it's not, it's a perfectly nice number with a lazy piano that rolls more than it rocks (at least in the chorus). To the extent that it is, then lawd gawd why not listen to (gulps) the real thing? Or even the unreal thing, e.g., Blondie's "One Way or Another" from the same year. "San Jacinto" has a creepy coda...that starts 5:20 into a 6:34 track of trebly tinkle. "I Have the Touch" is a slinky dance track that unfortunately stays at "Safety Dance" levels of speed and the nifty section when Gabriel mirrors the rhythm with the "Pull my chin/Stroke my hair" verses again comes near the end of the song. I love "Shock the Monkey" unreservedly, "Solsbury Hill" is a roving classic, and "Games Without Frontiers" dazzles despite Kate Bush's hideous French pronunciation. But too much of his oeuvre through 1982 passes by respectfully in the background. It's no surprise that he soon became a soundtrack maestro. 

I assumed 1986's So was where Gabriel took whatever miasma he'd been working up for the past near-decade and whipped into shape. But even at the time, I couldn't stand "Sledgehammer" and "Don't Give Up." Revisiting again after almost thirty years, I'm nevertheless stunned at how much I cannot stand his (American) pop breakthrough. The former trudges by at 96 BPM, a lynchable offense on most dancefloors, never mind the grody lyric that allowed the thing to wink-nudge its way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter raises the suspicion that Gabriel was trying for a pop-new age fusion, damn near inaudible in its wispy, detail-free atmospheric(s). It's a charge that could be leveled against baffling ILM fave "Mercy Street" and even John Cusack fave "In Your Eyes" as well. That's over half the album's running time right there. Thankfully, "Big Time" picks up the pace. But it's the only sign of life on this multiplatinum appliance. 

He should've stuck with soundtracking after that point. Us, the belated follow-up, is damn near unlistenable, punishingly slow and with a pathetic attempt to match "Sledgehammer"'s char position in "Steam." And just as I wisely never bothered listening to those Sha Na Na and Burt Reynolds albums in their entirety, I cherry picked Gabriel's post-Us oeuvre, taking in only the focus cuts of 2002's Up and appreciating his 2010 cover of the Magnetic Fields' "The Book of Love." Last year's I/O came out in various mixes and I quickly got sleepy trying to determine which I should listen to. What little I heard demonstrated that he was still atmopshering around too much for my ever-unsettled ass. 

Peter Gabriel 1 - I'm in a Car: B

Peter Gabriel 2 - I'm Scratching: B-minus

Peter Gabriel 3 - I'm Melting: B

Peter Gabriel 4 - Security (Ok this is one of the coolest, creepiest album covers ever): B

So: C

Us: C-minus

* This is how I explain other okay 1980s artists who become annoying in their okayness. INXS fused dance and rock and blanded out at both. U2 melded arena rock with post-punk and then tried to meld that mélange with pop and wound up with edge-less bloat or blurry wallpaper.

Big Star: Radio City (Ardent, 1974)

A shorthand for determining which of the three terrific Big Star albums is the masterpiece is to recognize Big Star as a semipopular band. Semipopular is Robert Christgau's coinage "for music that is popular in form but not fact--self-consciously arty music that plays off popular or formerly popular usages but isn't (sup posedly) designed to sell." So 1972's #1 Record errs too much on the popular side of the equation while 1978's Third/Sister Lovers gets lost in the semi wild. Side one of #1 Record laid down the foundations for power pop, a classic on those terms alone. But side two slips into the genericism that afflicts any strain of pop, power most definitely. And Third/Sister Lovers had such a tortured release history that there's no definitive edition of its sere, clanky psychodramas (although Complete Third reportedly collects every drib and drab recorded during the original 1974 sessions).

Yeah no, Radio City is Big Star's masterpiece, one of the ten greatest albums of the 1970s (do I hear five? Sold!). And yet it's difficult to recommend to non-music critics/geeks, especially any potential customers for the advertised pop. Music lovers of a certain age will notice that the very first sound on the album was replicated by Kenny Loggins for the central guitar riff of "Footloose." But opening track "O My Soul" is "Footloose" fed through a wood chipper. Like many of the songs on Radio City, it lurches forward like a gawky teenager trudging through snowbanks on the way to high school. Sometimes this kid manages a sprint. But usually, he loses his footing. One of the guitar lines sounds like a refugee from a Burroughsian cut-up experiment. Another offers some unfunky chicken scratching. A Mellotron pipes in now and then with extraneous (drunken?) commentary. And the entire things lumbers on for nearly six minutes. Heck a way to kick off a "pop" record.

And it doesn't get much easier from there, at least upon initial impact. Contrary to Chuck Berry's dictum on rock and roll music, the band keeps losing the backbeat which makes Radio City a no go for dancing. Its greatest track (see below) moves so slowly that it's difficult to use a BPM counter glacially enough to figure out just how slowly (84 or 42 BPM depending on how you're counting; I say the latter in terms of feel). However assiduously each song was constructed, most of the hooks and sound effects announce themselves as afterthoughts. Radio City is a temple of attention deficit disorder. Even at its most incandescently chartbound ("September Gurls" went to #1 in the minds of actual-pop agnostics the world over), every number is trying to score some Ritalin. To balance off the lengthy opening track with appropriate perversity, the album ends with two fragments totaling barely three minutes (presaged by #1 Record's last cut, the 59-second moan "ST 100/6").

Nonetheless, Radio City remains one of the most welcoming albums ever recorded, crazy porous and with myriad entry points. Resident pop theorist-practitioner Alex Chilton sounded more like a teen here than when he was an actual teen idol fronting the Box Tops with such hits as "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" in the late 1960s. His put-upon whine helps the zany structures go down more easily. Once acclimated, you hear not forbidding avant-gardery but sweet confusion, a confusion that persists for so many of us long past adolescence as indeed it did for Chilton who never got the glory (i.e., money) he deserved. I hear ache and a willingness to connect in its every intricate detail and suspect that eternity is not long enough to extinguish its ability to garner obsessive listening. 

Grade: A+

This is how I'd rank the songs in order of preference. 1 and 2 have long been etched in stone. 9 - 12 too. Any song in between could fluctuate, e.g., I just bumped up "You Get What You Deserve" two notches. 

1. What's Going Ahn
2. September Gurls
3. Life Is White
4. You Get What You Deserve
5. O My Soul
6. Morpha Too
7. Daisy Glaze
8. Back Of A Car
9. Way Out West
10. I'm In Love With A Girl
11. Mod Lang
12. She's A Mover