- Peter Gabriel: Global Citizen by Paul Hegarty
Peter Gabriel has been a leading innovator in pop music since the 1970s. Starting out as lead vocalist for the UK progressive-rock band Genesis, then leaving the group for a solo career, Gabriel has taken inventive approaches to crafting pop songs while achieving significant commercial success. Like fellow pop experimentalists David Bowie and Björk, Gabriel has made innovations that extend beyond musical style into technological developments and new formats for pop music, all done with a flair for theatricality. While Bowie and Björk both assumed personae that tended to create a distancing effect, Gabriel has portrayed himself throughout his solo career as a realist who strives for a more meaningful connection with audiences. Gabriel's drive for meaningful contact is evident in his musical and lyrical content, in his work with collaborators from other cultures through his Real World Records label, and in his support for various political causes, such as Amnesty International.
Paul Hegarty's book should satisfy most fans of Gabriel who want a deeper look into the artist and his music as well as popular-music scholars interested in broader issues of interactions between Western and non-Western musicians. Hegarty demonstrates how Gabriel has managed to be stylistically innovative and formally experimental while maintaining critical and commercial success. Hegarty also argues that Gabriel has exercised fairness in his creative engagement with collaborators from non-Western cultures, even though he operates from a privileged position as a Western artist and arbiter of so-called world music. Hegarty argues that Gabriel is aware of his position and sensitive to the concerns of musicians, thus he has taken great care to try to reduce the power imbalances inherent in the world-music industry.
The connection of musician to place, which is the guiding theme of the Reverb Series, is Hegarty's framework for telling Gabriel's story. Hegarty views Gabriel's work as focused on the "locatedness" of being, tracking how his musical practice reveals what it means to be in a specific place at a specific time. Several chapters are titled after significant places in Gabriel's life, with the first ("Albion") reflecting Gabriel's earliest lyrics with Genesis that concerned romantic myths and English pastoralism coming into conflict with the modernization of his home country. The cover image of Trespass (1970), the second album by Genesis, captures this idea with a portrait of a Renaissance couple peacefully gazing out at a tranquil landscape while a photo-realist image of a knife slashes through the painting. Gabriel's lyrics on subsequent Genesis albums became increasingly troubled about the future of England. Hegarty's two chapters on Gabriel's years in Genesis show how he and the band drew on [End Page 246] the English past in telling stories in extended song form that reflected contemporary problems of the early 1970s. Subjects ranged from ancient myths of hermaphroditic transformation to exploitative slumlord practices to apocalyptic sci-fi visions of genetic engineering. Transformation of the self, society, and the human body was central to many of Gabriel's early lyrics and laid the groundwork for later songs.
In the second chapter, "New York, New York," Hegarty provides an indepth look at the final Genesis album to feature Gabriel, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974). Gabriel chose New York City as a setting for a concept album that features a series of transformations by the main character of a story that blurs the lines of urban reality and dream-like fantasy. A hugely ambitious two-disc set with an elaborately costumed live show in which the album was performed from start to finish, The Lamb has been critically castigated for being guilty of progressiverock excess. Hegarty debunks some of the stereotypes about progressive rock, such as the lack of Black American musical influence, as Gabriel's vocal style has always drawn heavily on American soul. While the New York depicted in The Lamb is the fantasy of a...