Peter Gabriel, Us

If you are Peter Gabriel (and you probably aren't), then you really can�t go wrong. Even people who don�t particularly care for his music or haven�t followed his career would probably agree with me that it�s hard to find much fault with the man. There are certain famous people who, regardless of how you view their artistic output, seem like pretty decent guys: Dave Grohl, John Cusack, Garrison Keillor. I think I can confidently add Peter Gabriel to that list. Even better would be John Cusack holding a boom box above his head, blasting Peter Gabriel�s most famous song.

Strange, then, to consider that Peter Gabriel began his career in the late 1960s as an artistic antagonist, the prancing, theatrical, often vulgar foil to Genesis� ambitious progressive arrangements. His lyrics evoked images of hermaphroditic geriatrics, rotting flesh, and homicidal plant life. His compositions had back stories about incest, suicide, and castration. True, they were generally trussed up in some very poetic, very weird wordplay and backed by virtuosic arrangements, but his aesthetic thirty years ago was not for the faint of heart. When he embarked on a solo career in the mid-seventies, his music got a bit simpler, a bit more accessible, but there was still a very salient, often menacing absurdity to his themes. I�m not sure anyone could have predicted that he would soon record an anthemic tribute to anti-apartheid martyr Stephen Biko or pen what is generally agreed to be one of the best love songs of all time (�In Your Eyes�).

But even as he appealed more and more to the mainstream, Gabriel never really stopped being ambitious, or weird. Just warmer, more compassionate; his songs became more personal, introspective, approachable. He was suddenly the quintessential Sensitive Man, even back in the 80s, when being a Sensitive Man was not yet cool. By the time he released Us in 1992, he was practically awash in a sea of romantic empathy, and Us was the adult-contemporary soundtrack to a couples� support group that somehow had impossibly good taste in music. Reportedly created as a response to the dissolution of his marriage, Us is concerned with the healing that must inevitably come after a breakup, rather than whatever fault or rancor precipitated the relationship�s demise. Us could also be read as a manifesto for those still in love, who have known defeat and heartbreak but are resilient and determined to carry on.

For me, Us also represents a vivid cross-section of one relationship�s lifespan. I heard its first single, �Digging In The Dirt�, on the radio early in my sophomore year of high school, having just gotten my license and blasting the radio on the way to and from school. �Digging In The Dirt� was unlike anything else I�d ever heard, and I don�t think that�s just because I was a musically na�ve sixteen-year-old. I think it blew a lot of people away. The dirty drum loops, the serpentine guitars, the mysteriously sexual bass groove�it all foretold the trip-hop and ambient music revolutions that would come in the ensuing years.

So I got the album a couple days after it was released: the Thursday of Homecoming week, on my way to march in the goddamn parade with all the other band geeks. A few weeks later I would meet the girl I ended up dating for the bulk of the next year, a person who, as it happened, professed a huge admiration for Peter Gabriel. I think I dubbed her a cassette of Us as my initial overture of courtship. It quickly became �our album,� which was a substantial recovery, musically speaking, from our first kiss, which was at a high school dance and accompanied by �End Of The Road� by Boyz II Men.

So that�s how we claimed Us as ours in the ensuing months as we, two basically decent-hearted sixteen-year-olds, decided we were madly in love with each other. Mainly the song �Only Us,� which was perfect both for its message of maddeningly exclusive commitment to another person (Only us breathing, only us sleeping, only us dreaming, only us) and the howling ambient soundscapes which swirled over the staggered, minimalist groove. Perhaps our ingenuous take at romance was haphazard and ultimately doomed, but we thought we knew what we were doing at the time. We had no prior experience, no rulebooks to consult, and I suppose that�s what makes everyone�s first relationship endearing, at least in retrospect. We thought we were world-weary, embattered veterans of life�when in truth we didn�t have a clue�and Peter Gabriel�s delicately crafted exploration of love, loss, and healing couldn�t have been more appropriate. We pretended it was created just for us, and I suppose that�s the effect that most truly great albums should have, especially when you�re young.

So the song cycle continued, through the tender spiritual �Washing Of The Water�, the aforementioned �Digging In The Dirt� (which was, as it happened, about psychoanalysis), the silly �Kiss That Frog�, and the shattering finale �Secret World�. Something about that song soothes the ache that inevitably comes with the ending of things: the lyrics speak of nostalgia for happier times, but with the faith that life carries on. The song reaffirms what Gabriel has been saying throughout Us: in the end, it�s not really important whose fault it was, or who did what to whom, or exactly what hurtful things were said and not meant. Suddenly you�re beset by a number of readily applicable cliches, rendered profound by Gabriel's lyrics: let bygones be bygones, time heals all wounds, this too shall pass.

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