On January 1, 1984, television stations around the world aired a program produced by video artist Nam June Paik titled “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.” Described by host George Plimpton as “a rather unusual event in live television” and “a global disco,” Paik’s special aimed to counter George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the dawning year, where mass media and fascism were to become inextricable. Instead, Plimpton announced, the program would feature “positive and interactive uses of electronic media, which Mr. Orwell, the fierce media prophet, never predicted.”
As the broadcast wound on, however, it was clear that Paik created it with tongue firmly in cheek: It was plagued with technical difficulties in satellite link-ups, multiple performances airing at the same time, and wildly overdone graphics manipulation. Befitting the year that would inaugurate the music video revolution, “Good Morning” was an irreverent, avant-garde MTV in miniature, with performances by Merce Cunningham, Oingo Boingo, Allen Ginsberg, Simply Red, and to open the program, a duet between Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.
The two art-pop icons lip-synced “Excellent Birds,” which they’d co-written a week or so earlier at Paik’s request. The song’s aphoristic lyrics were aligned with Anderson’s 1982 debut Big Science, while the song’s funk-derived bassline and synthesized flute sample hewed much closer to Gabriel’s 1982 self-titled fourth solo album, dubbed Security by his American label Geffen. The green-screened visuals—cutting-edge for the time—staged the pair pensively gazing and spasmodically dancing over a series of dazzling and futuristic backdrops.
The “Birds” performance signified an important sonic and technological pivot point in Gabriel’s career. He split from UK art-rock titans Genesis nearly a decade earlier because he wanted fewer dissenting voices pushing back against his grand plans to more fully merge sound with visual images, and explore forms of music that didn’t emerge from the European canon. Like his avant-garde pop contemporaries Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, Gabriel moved out of a theatrical British art-rock group and into the ’80s with an eye towards non-Western composition and cutting-edge studio experimentation. Gabriel was an eager dilettante of Africa’s varied musical forms, soaking up South African film scores, Ethiopian folk music, and Senegalese drumming, often from dubbed cassettes. And like Eno and Fripp, Gabriel was not as interested in customs, habits, and beliefs, as much as he was dazzled by tones and rhythms and subject matter that, to him, expressed different emotions and alternate states of mind than European-rooted composition.
Gabriel’s obsession with the bleeding edge of digital studio technologies came from the same curiosity: How can I make noises and rhythms of my own that sound completely different than anything else? He was the first UK artist to purchase a programmable CMI Fairlight synthesizer—an early sampler—which he used on Security and its in 1980 predecessor (also self-titled, and popularly called Melt after its photo-manipulated cover image) to mutate his bizarre field recordings and smear the results through his music.
Security opener “The Rhythm of the Heat” is an early example of Gabriel’s studio-bound ethnographic pop experimentation. The song was inspired by psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s 1920s trip to Africa, to shed his modern European trappings and absorb the continent’s mystical power (the song’s working title was “Jung in Africa”). With similar colonialist naïvete, Gabriel wails that “the rhythm is inside me” and “the rhythm has my soul.” Unlike “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” there was no arch wink at the audience here—Gabriel was entirely sincere in his belief that he could technologically engineer a psychological transformation. In 1982, “Rhythm” sounded amazing, but even then, its cultural politics—Africa is where white Europeans go to find their “true” rhythmic soul—was laden with unexamined appropriation.
Two years earlier, Melt’s final track evinced a different side of Gabriel’s perspective on an artist’s role in African music and politics. Though he had proven his ability to sing as an earnest rock frontman on his 1977 hit “Solsbury Hill,” there was no real rock precedent for “Biko,” the epic seven-and-a-half minute power ballad about Steven Biko, an anti-apartheid activist who died in South African police custody in 1977. Gabriel set the song to a dirge tempo rooted in South African funeral music, slipped in and out of Xhosa in the lyrics, and added a synthesized bagpipe and Fripp’s distorted guitar for good measure. Others had experimented with African rhythms and guitar textures, but Gabriel had crafted a global anthem for a fallen African freedom fighter.
By 1984, Gabriel had been out of the industry’s spotlight for a couple of years, doing soundtrack work and getting his WOMAD festival—a combination of UK new wave acts and artists from around the world—off the ground. In his absence, the record business caught up to “Biko.” From late 1984 through 1985, the massive charity spectacles Band Aid, Live Aid, and “We Are the World” raised tens of millions for Ethiopian famine relief, while E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt organized the “Sun City” project to draw attention to the horrors of South African apartheid. In the liner notes for the album—to which Gabriel contributed a song—Van Zandt summed up the well-intentioned naïvete of rock’s white elite, thanking Gabriel for the “profound inspiration of his song ‘Biko,’ which is where my journey to Africa began.”
In 1986, Gabriel was invited to participate in Amnesty International’s “Conspiracy of Hope” stadium tour by Bono, who had used Live Aid’s global audience to cast himself as rock’s new messiah. For the June 1986 tour finale, Gabriel performed “Biko” to a stadium audience of 55,000 and an MTV television audience of millions more. His long-awaited fifth album, simply titled So, had been released a month earlier.
So was not an explicitly political album, but Gabriel’s outsized presence in 1986 and 1987 was synonymous with what might be called rock’s NGO phase: the moment when the world’s biggest superstars convinced themselves that doing their job bigger and more seriously could actually make the world a better place. So was released in the middle of pop’s most nakedly consumerist era, when the biggest artists were as unapologetic about their ambitions for global stardom as they were devoted to speaking out on global crises. The gap between superstar and everyone else was expanding exponentially. Advances in digital recording and mastering had clarified the sound of rock records, and the 74-minute capacity of the newly released compact disc encouraged sonic sprawl. Gabriel worked on So with one of the masters of rock’s new sonic frontier, Daniel Lanois, an Eno disciple who had just produced U2’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire.
In Gabriel’s choice of collaborators, So was a signpost for the future of the global record business. The disputed corporate genre “world music” doesn’t have a single origin point, of course, but it’s possible to hear in So’s musicians—French/Ivorian drummer Manu Katché, Senegalese vocalist Youssou N’Dour, Indian violinist L. Shankar, Brazilian percussionist Djalma Correa—a key moment when rock pivoted in its approach to the so-called “Third World,” from charity spectacle to studio collaboration.
The first 20 seconds of So’s first single “Sledgehammer”—a trilling, echo-laden bamboo flute created by an E-mu Emulator II synthesizer—is just a feint before the song explodes into a sharp left turn: a ’60s soul rave-up. Gabriel’s latest revelation wasn’t rooted in geopolitics, but his own libido (“I wanna be your sledgehammer” is a classic R&B double-entendre). And though he could have easily programmed the song’s brassy trumpet hook into his synthesizer, Gabriel was an R&B aficionado who valued cultural authenticity, so he flew in Otis Redding’s 1960s sideman Wayne Jackson to play the chart. In Gabriel’s global mindset, Jackson was every bit the bearer of a distinct musical tradition as Katché. He called the duo’s participation “a commanding blend of parallel heritages.”
Like art-punk turned R&B shouter David Byrne on 1978’s “Take Me to the River,” it was bracing to hear Gabriel, one of the most self-serious artists of his era, so at ease in a new idiom. For the first time in his recorded life, he actually seems to be having fun. Though it was a clear break with his earlier work, Gabriel knew exactly what he was doing. He crafted his first single in four years to fit perfectly into the era’s boomer-fueled R&B revival, a time when the radio and MTV were dominated by rejuvenated ’60s and ’70s icons Tina Turner, Kool and the Gang, the Pointer Sisters, and Lionel Richie, all of whom reinvigorated their careers with digitally gleaming updates on black pop’s golden age.
In late July, “Sledgehammer” hit No.1, coronating Gabriel as a bona fide pop star. While the song stood on its own, its music video took him to a world no artist had ever entered. Over a strenuous 100-hour week in April 1986, Gabriel and a team of animators—including Stephen Johnson, who produced the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and Aardman Animation, who would later create the claymation franchise “Wallace and Gromit”—produced the most innovative music video in the short history of the form. Eschewing cheesy digital visual effects for ostentatious stop-motion animation, claymation, and time-lapse videography, Gabriel was inserted into a series of dreamlike scenarios that occasionally mirrored the lyrics (a steam train, bumper cars, fruit), and were otherwise silly and bizarre (dancing raw chickens). “Sledgehammer” was an absolute sensation on MTV, winning 10 Video Music Awards and competing with “Thriller” in the network’s “best video of all time” countdowns. Not only was Gabriel a card-carrying member of rock’s diplomatic elite, but he was also now at the very forefront of its visual revolution.
“Big Time” borrows even more directly from Byrne, powered by Tony Levin’s fretless bassline and visualized by an animated video that opens with a tuxedo-clad Gabriel awkwardly dancing in front of video static. But while Byrne’s dialogue with modern life was one of quasi-religious self-realization, “Big Time” is a cheeky, self-referential bildungsroman, connecting Reagan-era bootstrapped corporate aspirationalism to Gabriel’s own desire for musical fame. Where the rest of So reaches solemnly outward to the non-Western world, “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time” insert Gabriel into a vivid, self-contained fantasy world; a sibling to the ’50s exotica-inspired wacky utopia of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, which also debuted in 1986.
Gabriel tackled the opposite side of ballooning Western capitalism on “Don’t Give Up,” an emotional response to the growing sense of working-class British despair under the stifling austerity of the Margaret Thatcher era. Like Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher preached the gospel of free-market individual resilience in the face of the skyrocketing unemployment. While Gabriel sketches a despondent scenario about a man on the verge of losing everything, Kate Bush alights on the chorus, her empyrean voice offering sincere comfort: “Don’t give up/’Cause you have friends/Don’t give up/You’re not beaten yet.” Bush and Gabriel had collaborated before (she provided the eerie vocal counterpoint on “Games Without Frontiers”), and she had zoomed past him in his absence to the vanguard of experimental UK art-pop. Now, they held one another in a deep embrace for the length of the “Don’t Give Up” video, the perfect visualization of such a simple, compassionate sentiment, cradled by the gossamer chords of the CS-80 synthesizer. Though rooted in a very 1980s political reality, three-and-a-half decades later it is perhaps Gabriel’s most affecting song.
A simple dialogue of worry countered by encouragement, delivered while spinning in full embrace: “Don’t Give Up” seems drawn from Gabriel’s established interest in fringe science approaches to performative displays of extreme emotion. He had become close with the counterculture’s favorite psychotherapist R.D. Laing and had participated in Erhard Seminars Training (EST), the cultish late-’70s self-discovery fad started by a former car salesman. In his abiding belief that music should express a profound sense of emotional compassion and catharsis, his closest peers were Tears for Fears, whose titanic 1985 LP Songs from the Big Chair was inspired by the “primal scream” work of psychologist Arthur Janov.
Thanks to his deep engagement with Jung, Gabriel believed that dream interpretation was the most important key to personal emotional transformation. “I take dreams very seriously,” he told Spin in 1986. “I think everyone should.” Imagery drawn from the unconscious suffuses So from the first verse of the first song, the U2-sized “Red Rain”: “I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream/I cannot make a single sound as you scream.” Dreams are the subject of “Mercy Street,” as well, inspired by a posthumously published work by Pulitzer-winning poet Anne Sexton. Sexton started writing poetry while recovering from a breakdown, and her therapist encouraged her to pull subject matter from her dreams. Gabriel was drawn to her poem “45 Mercy Street,” where Sexton recounts wandering through a dreamscape, looking for the imaginary address through which she could access a fictional idyllic past. With misty synths muting Djalma Correa’s ululating percussion, Gabriel offers an exegesis of Sexton’s work and then expands her narrative universe, ending with the poet peacefully sailing on the ocean with her father.
The heady emotional state of So was further complicated by the fact that Gabriel’s 15-year marriage was on the verge of collapse. His side-relationship with Rosanna Arquette was an open secret, and the album’s lyric sheet is rife with references to fledgling attempts at personal communication. Though “That Voice Again” has the album’s most appealing non-“Sledgehammer” chorus, it also contains the album’s most biting lyric, which could have been drawn straight from a counseling session: “I want you close I want you near/I can’t help but listen/But I don't want to hear/Hear that voice again.” In this context, the album’s inclusion of longtime concert staple “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)”—named for the notorious psychological experiment that claimed to prove humans were innately predisposed to harm others—gains an added layer of resonance.
In the years after So’s release, it was revealed that Gabriel conceived its best and most enduring song while fully enamored of Arquette. Originally titled “Sagrada Familia” in tribute to Antonio Gaudi’s Barcelona basilica and reportedly inspired by the myth of rifle heiress Sarah Winchester’s delusional construction of a maze-like mansion, Gabriel’s lyrics for “In Your Eyes” equate romantic infatuation to getting lost in a beautiful, mysteriously constructed edifice. Though now beloved as much for its climactic use in 1989’s Say Anything..., wedding dances, and senior proms, in 1986 the song signaled a new turn in rock’s engagement with African music. The track’s production is its own marvel of sonic construction, Katché’s quietly complex rhythmic syncopations meshing with Jerry Marotta’s rock-derived drumming, leading to a transfixing coda belted out by N’Dour, who translated the refrain into his native Wolof.
