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.