Stephen Thomas Erlewine @ AllmusicAs the leader of
Genesis in the early '70s, Peter Gabriel helped move progressive rock to new levels of theatricality. In his solo career, Gabriel was no less ambitious, but he was more subtle in his methods. With his first eponymous solo album in 1977, he began exploring darker, more cerebral territory, incorporating avant-garde, electronic, and worldbeat influences into his music. The record, as well as its two similarly titled successors, established Gabriel as a critically acclaimed cult artist, and with 1982's
Security, he began to move into the mainstream; "Shock the Monkey" became his first Top 40 hit, paving the way for his multi-platinum breakthrough
So in 1986. Accompanied by a series of groundbreaking videos and the number one single "Sledgehammer,"
So became a multi-platinum hit, and Gabriel became an international star. Instead of capitalizing on his sudden success, he began to explore other interests, including recording soundtracks and running his company Real World. By the time he returned to pop with 1992's
Us, his mass audience had faded away and he spent the remainder of the '90s working on multimedia projects for Real World.
Following his departure from
Genesis in 1976, Peter Gabriel began work on the first of three consecutive eponymously titled albums; each record was named
Peter Gabriel, he said, as if they were editions of the same magazine. In 1977, his first solo album appeared and became a moderate success due to the single "Solsbury Hill." Another self-titled record followed in 1978, yet received comparatively weaker reviews. Gabriel's third eponymous album was his artistic breakthrough. Produced by
Steve Lillywhite and released in 1980, the album established Gabriel as one of rock's most ambitious, innovative musicians, as well as one of its most political -- "Biko," a song about a murdered antiapartheid activist, became one of the biggest protest anthems of the '80s. "Games Without Frontiers," with its eerie chorus, nearly reached the Top 40.
In 1982, Gabriel released
Security, which was an even bigger success, earning positive reviews and going gold on the strength of the startling video for "Shock the Monkey." Just as his solo career was taking off, Gabriel participated in a one-shot
Genesis reunion in order to finance his WOMAD -- World of Music, Arts and Dance -- Festival. WOMAD was designed to bring various world musics and customs to a Western audience, and it soon turned into an annual event, and a live double album was released that year to commemorate the event. As Gabriel worked on his fifth album, he contributed the soundtrack to
Alan Parker's 1984 film
Birdy. His score was highly praised and it won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes that year. After founding Real World, Inc. -- a corporation devoted to developing bridges between technology and multiethnic arts -- in 1985, he completed his fifth album,
So.
Released in 1986,
So became Gabriel's commercial breakthrough, largely because his Stax homage "Sledgehammer" was blessed with an innovative video that combined stop-action animation with live action.
So climbed to number two as "Sledgehammer" hit number one, with "Big Time" -- featuring a video very similar to "Sledgehammer" -- reaching the Top Ten and "In Your Eyes" hitting the Top 30. As
So was riding high on the American and British charts, Gabriel co-headlined the first benefit tour for Amnesty International in 1986 with
Sting and
U2. Another Amnesty International Tour followed in 1988, and the following year, Gabriel released
Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, a collection of instrumentals used in
Martin Scorsese's film.
Passion was the furthest Gabriel delved into worldbeat, and the album was widely acclaimed, winning the Grammy Award in 1989 for Best New Age Performance. In 1990, he released the hits compilation
Shaking the Tree.
Gabriel labored long on the pop-music follow-up to
So, finally releasing
Us in the spring of 1992. During the recording of
Us, Gabriel went through a number of personal upheavals, including a painful divorce, and those tensions manifested themselves on
Us, a much darker record than
So. For various reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it was released six years after its predecessor,
Us wasn't as commercially successful as
So, despite positive reviews. Only one single, the "Sledgehammer" knockoff "Steam," reached the Top 40, and the album stalled at platinum sales. In 1993, Gabriel embarked on the most ambitious WOMAD tour to date, touring the United States with a roster including
Crowded House,
James, and
Sinéad O'Connor, with whom he had an on-off romantic relationship. The following year, he released the double-disc
Secret World Live, which went gold. Later in 1994, he released the CD-ROM Xplora, one of many projects he developed with Real World. For the next three years, Gabriel concentrated on developing more multimedia projects for the company.
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J.D.Considine @ Rolling StoneOver the course of his career, British rocker Peter Gabriel has metamorphosed from theatrical prog-rock cult artist to canny, multimedia pop star to worldly rock sage. It's been a dramatic change: Fans of sly, pop/funk singles like "Big Time" might actually find it hard to accept that their hero was also responsible for the baroque silliness that is "Moribund the Burgermeister."
Gabriel's first three solo albums -- each entitled
Peter Gabriel, although the remastered versions are helpfully numbered 1, 2, and 3 -- were experiments in reinvention. The first
Peter Gabriel (the cover of which finds our hero half-hidden behind a wet windshield) arrived three years after his last studio recording with Genesis, 1974's arty, ambitious
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Between the flabby dramatics of "Moribund the Burgermeister" and the forced whimsy of "Excuse Me," it was clear that Gabriel without Genesis wasn't all that different from Gabriel with. Yet the folky economy of "Solsbury Hill" and the understated majesty of "Here Comes the Flood" clearly pushed toward something else -- not mainstream pop, exactly, but something close.
The second
Peter Gabriel (with the fingernails cover) moves closer to that new sound. Produced by King Crimson's Robert Fripp -- himself a prog-rock star hoping to remake himself to fit a postpunk world -- the album finds Gabriel trying to square his past with the (then) present. "D.I.Y.," his paean to self-produced punk, seems especially prescient in the post-Napster world, while the spare, abstract "Exposure" reveals an unexpected edge. Still, neither the Who-style pomp of "On the Air" nor the ham-fisted pathos of "Home Sweet Home" suggests that Gabriel was surrendering his old turf easily.
It's the third
Peter Gabriel album (with the melting-face cover) that finally puts him on the proper path. Rather than being written on piano and having the ideas translated to band arrangements, the songs on this album were written using digital synthesis and drum loops. Suddenly, there's a new urgency to Gabriel's voice as he rides the rhythms of "Intruder" and "No Self Control," while the blissfully transcendent "Biko" and "Games Without Frontiers" hint at a pop future very different from the guitar-based world Gabriel came up in.
Security expands on those possibilities by adding world-music elements to the mix. Gabriel had already made moves toward African music in "Biko," which opened with a brief mbube chorale, but that bit of color is nowhere near as dramatic as the burst of percussion that the Ekome Dance Company provides in "The Rhythm of the Heat." It isn't simply exoticism that makes the song (or the similarly flavored "San Jacinto" and "The Family and the Fishing Net") so intriguing; it's the way Gabriel incorporates these rhythmic ideas into his melodic concepts, resulting in a kind of magic that's as applicable to the boisterously tuneful "Shock the Monkey" as the moody, mysterious "I Have the Touch."
Gabriel's internationalist musical strategy didn't translate particularly well to live performance, at least not by the evidence of
Plays Live (although
P.O.V., a 1990 concert video shot with a different band and repertoire, isn't quite so flat). But it does make excellent soundtrack source material. In fact, several selections on the all-instrumental
Music From the Film "Birdy" are reworkings of tunes from
Security and the third
Peter Gabriel, transforming familiar melodies into emotionally evocative mood pieces.
With So, Gabriel finally figures out how to play these new tools as pop. Amazingly, he does so without compromising the ambition or adventurousness of his previous efforts. Although the hits "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time" are pointedly funk-driven (and serve up a fair amount of sarcasm with their big-beat arrangements), the rest of the album shows how much Gabriel had gleaned from his world-music side project, the W.O.M.A.D. (World of Music, Arts, and Dance) Festival. There are allusions to Zimbabwean Shona mbira themes in Tony Levin's bassline for "Don't Give Up," and Senegalese mbalax singing (courtesy of Youssou N'Dour) spikes the final choruses to "In Your Eyes." Exotic touches, to be sure, but delivered in a context conventional enough to make them palatable to any pop fan.
Gabriel's second soundtrack album,
Passion (composed for Martin Scorsese's
The Last Temptation of Christ), is similarly world-music savvy, though it draws more from the Middle East than Africa. Unlike
Birdy, it feels more like a genuine film score, covering a range of styles (from Gabrielesque prog rock to quasi-symphonic tone poems), and suggests that there are depths to Gabriel that his pop work barely hints at.
Shaking the Tree, by contrast, makes no such moves in that direction, offering only a representation of his big hits augmented by a fresh collaboration with Youssou N'Dour (the title tune) and a new version of "Here Comes the Flood."
Us, which followed, did its best to pick up where So left off, mixing sophis-ticated funk-pop ("Steam," "Kiss That Frog") with issue-oriented art rock. In this case, however, the issues were more personal, focusing more on psychosexual drama than on social issues, which lent the whole project the fruity air of postanalytic revelation instead of pop-culture inspiration. None of that was audible in
Secret World Live, however, which made the pop content seem more like the white funk it wanted to be, while rendering the artier fare all the more indigestible.
That, sadly, seems to have been the high-water mark for Gabriel. Eight years passed before he finally released a new album, and that turned out to be another
Birdy-like soundtrack,
Long Walk Home (from the film
Rabbit-Proof Fence). Taken on its own, it not only complements the film's vision of the Western Australian outback, but reduces many of the major themes from his subsequent "commercial" release, Up, to a far more potent essence. Up, on the other hand, manages to make several of Gabriel's stylistic habits -- grandiloquent prog, slyly mannered funk -- seem less like strengths than tics, and (worse) with the tabloid TV-bashing "Barrie Williams Show" turns his gift for satire into an embarrassing and slow-arriving statement of the obvious. We deserve better -- and so does he.
After
Up, Gabriel seems to have tried to make up for his slack productivity in the '90s by releasing numerous new albums. Sadly, he's done so without producing much in the way of new music. The misleadingly titled
Hit offers only one new song ("Burn You Up, Burn You Down") while recapping much of
Up and rounding the disc out with middling rarities plus a sprinkling of actual hits. It's hardly an improvement on
Shaking the Tree. Simultaneously, he has been releasing concert recordings online through the "Encore Series" (www.themusic.com). There were 21 released from his 2003 tour, and several dozen more planned for his 2004 outing. It beats writing new songs, apparently.
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Peter Gabriel @ You Tube 
