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come talk to me
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"I suppose that, rather than dealing with allusion and fantasy, I thought it was time to get my hands dirty and deal with the real stuff that was going on."
As the title suggests Us is a reflective and intimate record. Peter is certainly far more revealing on this album than on any of his previous work. Where in the past Gabriel constructed characters, sometimes far removed from himself, to explore emotions and ideas, on Us Peter has looked inwards. All this introspection can make an artist's work particularly boring (as Peter himself has acknowledged), but this time around PG has tempered the navel gazing with some of the most sublime music he has created. Using the Real World bank of extremely talented musicians, the sonic backdrop for Us is smooth but engaging, cerebral but still passionate. Some of the more successful soundscapes from Passion are adapted to the album's pop(ish) music format, while the lyrics explore themes of sexuality, anger, despair and pain, though still imbued with a sense of hope in the future. Us emerged after (altogether now) "divorce and the break up of another relationship", but also five years of therapy. Peter has been involved with therapy and self improvement of one kind or another on off since the late 1970's. As one writer put it: "the Gabriels went to a marriage guidance council, an EST course, shaved their heads and experimented with the diceman philosophy. Peter tried yoga, hung upside down from "gravity boots", immersed himself a "Samadhi floatation tank". He even jogged..." So perhaps the themes which flow through Us shouldn't have been so surprising.
Although only a (relatively) recent release, Peter seems to have quite an affinity with this collection of songs. Certainly his emotional investement is apparent in his cover notes for the record, dedicating it to his parents, his (ex)wife Jill, Rosanna Arquette (the "other relationship"), and his daughters. In statements he has made, he places it alongside the third Peter Gabriel album as a record which doesn't have enormous success at the time of release, but which gains considerable respect with hindsight. Perhaps Us wasn't the monster he may have expected, but this record has done some fairly hefty business in the years since its release. Certainly the success of the singles Digging in the Dirt and Steam, at least in this country, served to keep Gabriel on radio playlists for the next five or six years (only to have since disappeared altogether).
Us heralded a re-emergence of the visual potential of his music hinted at in the videos made for the So album. The information which surrounds this release is incredible. The videos (both long and short form), the CD rom (Xplora 1: essentially a logical extension of the All About Us video), the magazine (The Box: a precursor to Real World Notes), the art commissioned for each track on the album. It seems that the visual department of Peter's mind had finally regrouped since The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway over seventeen years previously.
More than any other PG release Us invites strong comparisons with So. although there are common themes and forms (eg. psychological tensions, open sexual references, up tempo soul tinged single material, duet with ballsy femme), Us presents a pallette for the more patient listener, exploring its emotion slowly and circuitously. as such many argue that Us uncovers a far deeper emotive landscape than So. Others complain that Us is too dour in its outlook, that the record leaves the listener with a slight chill. Perhaps these listeners simply are not listening hard enough. Us seems to be less about negative emotions than a transcendence of such negative emotion into hope.
It happens time and again on these tracks: a critical point has been reached (often within the context of a relationship) and although it may be painful, it becomes the catalyst for a new direction; a new beginning. On Love to be Loved: "...and I let go", in the achingly beautiful high E sung at the end of Blood of Eden's bridge section, in Washing of the Water's "...letting go", in the double time bridge of Secret World, Us reads as an argument for hope in almost every song.
Love to be Loved is often overlooked on Us, even in contemporary reviews that usually dismiss it as a filler. This is a gross miscalculation of a song with an enormous emotional investment and an energetic and exciting performance from Manu Katche and Tony Levin (particularly brilliant is the pause between the first chorus and the second verse, almost bursting with its own energy). As with most songs on Us, there is no doubt that Peter is singing about himself, but Love to be Loved touches universal themes, mostly in the inner struggle of most relationships between selflessness and self pity. Peter has remarked (very wisely) that relationships do not operate in neutral. Either you're working on a relationship or it's going backwards. Peter spent much of the late 80s and early 90s studying his relationships and Love to be Loved benefits from his new found sensitivity and perspective on this often delicate area. On this song, Peter gives us all the reasons why his relationships haven't worked out (beautifully captured in the line "that fear of letting go").
Catharsis comes in the song's bridge section. Essentially this conforms to the psychotherapeutic process: identify the problem, understand the problem then work on ways of coutering the thought and behaviour patterns that have led to the problem. Peter has literally taken himself apart and he's not sure of what he's discovered "...don't know who the hell I'm saving anymore". But then taking the process to its final step, Peter overcomes his fear. He lets go. The final lines of the song in this context then arrive as an affirmation of who he is (the perfectly concise: "I recognise who much I've lost/but I cannot face the cost"), but this time it is imbued with a sense of hope that things will not always be the same. Possibly the most admirable aspect of Love to be Loved, apart from its brutal honesty, is its avoidance of a picture perfect ending, that PG has "been through therapy and come out the other side as a different person so that was £5,000 well spent". The song suggests, quite rightly, that this is merely the beginning of a long journey and that Peter may always have to resist selfish tendencies in relationships. The point of the song (and of the psychology) is that there is no quick fix. Hats off to Peter, then, for a remarkably mature and deceptively difficult piece of music!
The opening guitar riff heralds the instrument's dominance throughout this track. Any synths here are purely icing. Unusual for peter Gabriel songs of this vintage that are commonly built up from long sythesiser chords (eg. Fourteen Black Paintings), Digging in the Dirt may be a prelude to material featured on Peter's next record due sometime in the next fifty years and rumoured to be guitar-based. After the earthy humanness of Washing of the Water, Digging in the Dirt has a very mechanical feel to it. Unlike Steam, the drums used on this track are the acoustic garden-variety, though here they have been technologically altered in the studio to give the song's opening an almost clincal feel. It is this technological meddling that gives Digging in the Dirt its hardened edge, a sound that has become popular in the late 90s and can be heard on Smashing Pumpkins' Adore and REM's Up.
And lyrically? Welcome to Gabriel the bastard! Peter's inspiration and intention behind Digging in the Dirt are well documented. Here we find another song with its genesis in counselling and psychological navel-gazing, but here, like much of the rest of Us, this introversion hardly seems apparent at first glance. While Digging in the Dirt's darkness of tone is hardly a new element in Peter's music, the frankly nasty lyric is the first of its kind in the PG catalogue. Where before Peter has relied on the creation of a character or a mask to explore this darkness (see Intruder, Lead a normal life, or even the nastier characters from The lamb Lies Down on Broadway), here the masks are down and darker aspects of the man emerges. It must be said: who would have thought the old boy had this in him?
In some ways, Digging in the Dirt parallels the work of John Lennon circa 1970 (ie. the record Plastic Ono Band ). Both men were heavily influenced by pop psychology, possibly by the same brand of psychology. In lennon's case the influence is Arthur Janov's "Primal Therapy", in Gabriel's case the influence is less well documented, although EST certainly rears its head (says Peter of EST: "...hate the way it's marketed, like how well it worked"). The comparison shows how Gabriel tends to universalise his personal issues, showing a little more restraint and steering away from such stark nakedness as Lennon's Mother. In some ways this merely highlights the contrast between the two men, instantly summed up as heart (Lennon) versus head (Gabriel).
Another contrast is where Gabriel cleverly chooses to humanise his bastard, allowing a violent screaming rage ('I told you, I told you...!') to fly wildly into confusion fear and insecurity ('...stay with me I need support'), in much the same way as his assassin did on Family Snapshot. But unlike Family Snapshot, the present song avoids drifting into pointless anger for its own sake in its heavy allusion to the therapeutic process. Peter has often spoken of this process in describing Digging in the Dirt, though he uses the following metaphor: 'It's about digging up demons which are powerful when underground, but lose their power when exposed to daylight.'
After the special effects cornucopia and hit making potential that was the Sledgehammer video, it's conceivable that Peter felt some pressure to make an impact with the video for Digging in the Dirt. The challenge here would be to incorporate advances in visual technology and create vision that would not be at odds with the gritty nastiness of the song. Hiring as director John Downer (famous for his unique approach to nature documentary filmmaking) may at first seem unlikely, but the results speak for themselves. Downer sticks to the subject matter he knows pitting Gabriel against (the now legendary) snails, wasps, flies, and of course maggots. The metaphor of Gabriel 'digging up his demons' is taken literally (see the picture above) and the demons themselves are represented by clay animated versions of Zush's characters. Zush is a somewhat eccentric Catalan artist (join the queue), whose slightly deranged expression was commisioned to represent Digging in the Dirt in sculptural form that was then used on the record liner notes. The video for Digging in the Dirt was also the subject of extremely mild controversy. MTV apparently avoided playing it (rather than banning it outright) apparently particularly worried that the scenes where Gabriel smashes up a car attempting to squash a fly would be misinterpreted as images of violence against women. While Gabriel is far from a mysongynist, there are defintely some heavy allusions to violence against women in these scenes. However it's all pretty subtle really and unlikely to even rate (let alone offend) once you've sat through one or two Marylin Manson videos.
As the first single from Us, this song was not an obvious choice and it is uncertain as to whose decision it was. Regardless the move was a brave one that didn't quite pay off. Despite its heavy radio airplay up until approximately 1996, Digging in the Dirt never quite became the mega hit that Real World, Virgin and Geffen were undoubtedly hoping for. First singles rarely do with an established artist, major paydirt is often struck with a second or third single and evidently Steam was being saved up for precisely this purpose. However Digging in the Dirt has achieved a reasonable level of success especially given its often ugly subject matter and virtually no support from the video.
Written by Mercutio
while he had too much time
on his hands. Thankfully this has now been rectified.