The 25 best Peter Gabriel songs, according to me (Part 2)
Exploring the majesty of "Melt" and the splendor of "Security"
In Part 1 of this unapologetically biased Peter Gabriel full-career survey, I focused mostly on his solo work of the late 1970s. Now the going really gets good.
“Not One of Us” (Peter Gabriel 3 [Melt], 1980)
Among the many innovations on the Melt album is its use of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), which spawned digital audio sampling as we know it today. “Not One of Us” puts this trailblazing device to work almost immediately. First Gabriel, backed only by the off-mic chuckles of his mates in the studio, lets out a few patented octave-jumping yelps. Then one of those yelps, having been sampled by the Fairlight, returns—in rhythm, at four yelps to the bar—as a kind of percussive hook for the song’s intro and outro. The song itself, like most of Melt, finds Gabriel adapting to the New Wave; it’s lean and mean, with a mordant worldview and an energy born of righteous anger. Just a few lyrics are necessary to summarize (deftly) the essential trouble with our planet, then and now: humankind’s overdeveloped sense of tribalism. On lines like “A foreign body and a foreign mind” and “There’s safety in numbers when you learn to divide,” Gabriel digs hard into every instance of the letter d, pronouncing it almost as if it were a t (a true dental plosive, in the parlance of my long-ago undergrad linguistics class). Very clipped, very reserved, very English, a demonstration in sound—or sount, if you will—of the authorities cutting off all debate.
“San Jacinto” (Peter Gabriel 4 [Security], 1982)
The Fairlight experiments that began on Melt move much further to the fore on Security, producing timbral combinations so unsettling that, more than 40 years later, they still sound like the future. Through this foreboding atmosphere Gabriel’s voice floats, mourns and praises. “San Jacinto” is an emotional distillation of the Native American experience, of clinging to a vanishing culture, of watching yourself being turned into a cultural signifier for the amusement of hostile strangers—not a job, it need hardly be said, that offers much to burnish one’s self-image or feed one’s family. Three vocal moments stick out: the weary descent into resignation of “It feels like dying/Slow/Letting go of life,” the contrasting pained upward glissando of “White wind blow,” and the eerie coda (“We will walk/On the land,” etc.), during which Gabriel’s voice may or not be slowed down. At first it seems like there’s no way he could achieve such an alien tone naturally. Then again, he’s Peter Gabriel.
“I Have the Touch” (Peter Gabriel 4 [Security], 1982)
On pretty much any other PG album, “I Have the Touch” would have been treated like a pop hit. On Security, with all the Fairlight sample manipulating and processing—plus the edict from the boss that drummer Jerry Marotta use no cymbals in his kit—it’s severely warped, each note seeming to land on a blanket of dead air. Given that this song is supposed to be about getting close to other people, Gabriel’s vocal performance is remarkable for its chilliness. (When he sings “Shake those hands,” he does the same trick with that final s as he did with the ds on “Not One of Us,” overemphasizing it and then cutting it short.) But this brisk approach just adds to the weirdo allure of the whole thing. It’s the cry of the lifelong brainiac yearning to get physical. And that insistent closing “Tac-tac-tac-contact” hook is undeniable.
“Shock the Monkey” (Peter Gabriel 4 [Security], 1982)
The video for this song was my first exposure to Peter Gabriel. I was 10. The face paint! The circling camera! The coin flip! The office door with GABRIEL on it! The sinister moving lamps! And of course ... the dwarves! (Not the most culturally sensitive term these days, I know.) Those images have stayed in my mind for decades, and they made me a PG fan. Probably my all-time favorite music video. The tune itself ain’t too shabby either, and the performance is a compendium of so many Gabriel vocal tics that I adore: the way he bites into his vowels Otis Redding-style on “Something knocked me out the trees,” the loopy leaps into falsetto range, the word-ending yelps (“Cover me when I breathe”). Last but by no means least, there’s the outro, with those alternating low and high repeats of the title phrase. The low ones are aggressive. The high ones are batshit. When I got to this part of the video, little 10-year-old me was thinking something like “What the hell is this?” I continue to think something like that whenever I hear “Shock the Monkey” now. In a good way.
“Wallflower” (Peter Gabriel 4 [Security], 1982)
Gabriel famously took part in the Conspiracy of Hope (1986) and Human Rights Now! (1988) tours to support Amnesty International, but as this song shows, his concern for prisoners of conscience predates those jaunts. After painting a grim picture of confinement, interrogation and torture, “Wallflower” urges its subject(s) not to give in. He/she/they have a vital advantage over their oppressors, for “they do not see your road to freedom/Which you build with flesh and bone.” Gabriel’s singing here is a triumph of the heart; the repeated lines “Hold on” and “They put you in a box so you can’t get heard” ache with empathy. “Wallflower” is also a bright shining moment for the distinctive shimmery ring of the Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano, a PG favorite during this period. I’ve heard rumors that when Gabriel was working on his Scratch My Back/And I’ll Scratch Yours project in the early 2010s, he was in fairly serious talks with Radiohead about covering this song. I don’t know why it didn’t happen, but I’d love to hear Thom Yorke try it.
Next up: Part 3, which (as previously hinted) includes my No. 1 Peter Gabriel song.