"Growing Up"

By Mac Cat, Video Critic and Analysist

Before we begin, you need to know this acronym: ISTMSBIDKW. It stands for "I'm Sure This Means Something But I Don't Know What."

Peter Gabriel never ceases to surprise me.

One thing that's always annoyed me about the "Steam" video is the part where the song goes "Everybody nose dive..." The whole video up to this point is filled with whimsy and sensual imagery. Then the most blatantly suggestive part of the song comes along, and it's accompianied by a series of images of an embryo morphing to a baby to a child, then into our Gabriel, and so on up to an old man. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat effect, but it doesn't fit in with the rest of the video. It's like, "Okay, here we have fun and sex and sex and more sex...and now it's The Seven Ages of Man...and now we're back to fun and sex and sex and..."

So when the "Growing Up" video was released, I fully expected it to be a long version of the sequence described above...after all, "Growing Up", life and death, is what the song is about. But to my pleasant surprise Gabriel bypassed the obvious visuals.

The video starts out as all videos should: With a close up of Gabriel's cute, kissable face.

Soon the scene switches to a man and woman descending from the heaven in bubbles, touching down on a beach covered in rocks too round and perfect to be natural.

Next, you see the bubble with the woman inside walk inside the stomach of a woman lying down on the beach. When I first viewed this video, I thought, "Aha! This must sybolize a woman's pregnacy as the beginning of life!" But then...

Same deal happens with the guy. Last time I checked, guys don't get pregnant. Okay, so much for my theory.

Soon the young yuppie couple start walking along the beach towards each other, still encased in bubbles, and the two bubbles merge. The couple proceeds to stare, hug, and cavort in manner befitting a soap opera or paperback romance novel cover. Gag. Where's Gabe at? We need him now.

Soon the beat picks up and we see a kid playing with a car. Okay, surely this must represent childhood, and now we're getting into the Ages of Man schpiel.

But no...it quickly switches from kid to a bustling cityscape, people on the street, cars, buildings, you name it.

The effects used here are pretty neat...all the people are surrounded by bubbles, just like in the prior scenes. ISTMSBIDKW. The buildings and background have a one-dimentional-and-layered feel to it like during parts of the Steam video, giving it a cartoonish look. The cars look like toys, and there's movement everywhere that gives the scene energy.

Ah, now the "One dot..." section. The scene cuts to Gabe's floating head and an animated drop of water. As he sings, the view of his face fluidly shifts from one side to the other along with the water droplet. Then for "Two dot" Gabriel face divides into two, and the shifting sequence begins again in perfect time to the beat. It's a simple yet striking effect, and probably more difficult to pull off than it looks. Some tricky camerawork and smooth digital work went into this effect.

As evidenced by the shadows and the angles of Gabriel's face(s?), it's not a simple mirroring technique where the same footage of Gabriel singing is copied and duplicated...they must've been filming Gabriel's face from all sides, and then digitally altered it to get the fluid movements.

Back to the city. We see a woman sitting next to an old man on a bench. The woman looks suspiciously like the same woman cavorting on the beach earlier. Then a young man (same guy as was on the beach) enters the scene, and sits down next to the woman...right on top of the old man, who promptly disappears. ISTMSBIDKW.

Buildings pop up everywhere, and construction workers haul around and plonk down entire buildings for a cool, cartoony effect. A traffic jam of toy cars and their bubble people (man, I never thought I'd be writing a line like that on this site) piles up on the street, and more cuts to the man and woman sitting on the bench.

Back to Gabriel singing "My ghost likes to travel..." It's interesting that Gabriel, shown earlier as expressionless, breaks out in a really nice smile. It's as if he loves this part of the song, and was just bursting with joy at getting to (pretend to) sing it. Water droplets dance around him. Then Gabriel figues he's supposed to be serious now and goes back to keeping a straight face.

Some more scenes of the couple on the bench, but not much worth recounting. An old woman waters her flowers, and the water gets the couple wet. Then at some point, two bubbles emerge from the two, showing the couple as they were on the beach again. They merge into one bubble. Meanwhile the actual couple on the bench continue to ignore each other.

But what's really odd is that while all of this plays out, the "breathing stops I don't know when..." lyric is used. Apparently the entire verse about hooking up is edited out, although it would have been perfect for that scene.

The bubble floats off, and the couple get up from the bench and walk away from each other. The old guy suddenly reappears and walks away too. ISTMSBIDKW.

Now back to Gabriel and his three and four dots. This confirms my theory that Gabriel was filmed from all sides to get the simultaneous headshot angles. Did I mention that it's a really cool effect?

We see the old guy at a table with an open book. Appropriately, it's about the same time as the line "on the table there's an open book..." Then without explaination...

Flowers start popping up everywhere along with the buildings. ISTMSBIDKW.

The cartoonish feel, the buildings and flowers all come together to remind me of Gabriel's "Big Time" video. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Stephen Johnson had a hand in producing "Growing Up" as well.

Gabriel is back and like before, he seems to really enjoy singing "My ghost likes to travel..."

Remember the people in the traffic jam? They start sprouting bubbles too. ISTMSBIDKW. The bubbles land on the cars and like with the couple earlier, they merge together.

One interesting little detail: While most of the bubbles are merge in man/woman pairings, two guys share a bubble, and they hug. This is open to all sorts of interpretation. Perhaps it's a nod towards homosexual relationships? Or is it simply acknowleding that there are more to relationships than romance, and that friendships are important, too. You decide.

Huh?! Without any segueway or explaination, the couple is sprawled out in the middle of the street. How? Why? Huh?! Was there an accident? Did they decide to take a nap? I'm convinced that they had filmed more but they edited out important stuff. I feel like we're missing key parts of the story here...

The pair converts back to how they appeared on the beach, while onlookers get out of their cars (well, the cars just drop to the ground like cardboard props) and stare at the bodies. This makes me wonder, who are these guys in this video? Are they professional actors, or are they just friends and family of Gabriel and the production staff?

Cousin Bob: Hey, can I be in your video?

Gabriel: Sure. Just dress nicely, stand in front of a blue screen and look concerned for three seconds. Do you think you can handle that?

Soon the couple ascends back to their little paradise beach. The end!

In conclusion: This video has a bit of an indenty crisis. It can't make up it's mind on whether it wants to be a great mixed-up collage of images to fit a theme, as in "Big Time" or "Steam", or to tell a straightforward story. But the "story" and the images just don't seem to match up, and it just doesn't feel right. To add to the confusion, we have that awkward song edit. The one verse that seems to match the action is cut out completely. We have a "meet cute" and no lines about meeting up. We have buildings popping up in the background and no lines about "Empire State look high."

I can understand why they needed to cut the song: Too long for airplay. I can understand why they wanted to keep the verse of: "breathing stops, I don't know when" to signify the main point of the song of life and death. But it seems pointless in it's placement. When the "breathing stops" lyrics, appear, they show...two people sitting on a bench. The time when the final verse *would* make perfect sense, when the couple is sprawled out on the pavement, that part of the song is long gone. If they weren't going to put that lyric in the correct part of the video, then they should've just left it out completely, and kept the "Empire State" verse instead. The scene at the end with the couple walking to heaven would've been suffecient to cover the "circle of life" angle they were shooting for.

Still, it's evidenced that a lot of care and work went into this video, and it's better than 98% of what's out there in current videoland. I love the overall "feel" of the video, and I think the cartoonish images and hodgepodge scenes work better than the obvious images in the video for "Barry Williams Show". I'm glad that they didn't go for the obvious Ages of Man interpretation.

But speaking of the "Barry Williams Show" video, I must note a bothersome trend in Gabriel's recent videos as opposed to his earlier ones. Before, Gabriel's videos were All About The Gabe. Gabriel was the central figure in all of his videos, from Shock the Monkey to Sledgehammer to Digging in the Dirt, and Steam. He got his hands dirty. Massive face paint, being hung from the ceiling in a harness for several hours for the Kiss That Frog video, sitting still for an entire day with a plate of glass three inches from his face for Sledgehammer...Gabriel did it all.

Now it's like he's been regalated into merely making cameo appearences in his own videos, and that he doesn't have as much involvement in them. Even a quick throwaway scene of Eve-era Gabriel (with hat, overcoat, and red briefcase) walking through the cityscape would've been a nice touch, but nope...no evidence that Gabriel had anything to do with the scenes outside of the few face shots of his.

In his defense, I admit it's easy for me to whine about Gabriel not being more involved...I'm not the one who has to lie down for hours on end while a snail crawls across my face. And I can't really blame him for not going all gung-ho about making videos nowadays. Gabriel himself has said that videos have lost the sense of being new and exciting, which takes the fun out of making them. MTV doesn't play videos anymore, and they probably wouldn't play his even if it was absolutely, breathtakingly spectacular simply because he made the bad decision to, like, get older and stuff. For example, as awesome as "Digging in the Dirt" was, it didn't get half the recognition that "Sledgehammer" did, even though "Digging" technically is the better video.

Videos are expensive with money coming out of the profits of the furture sales of the album, so maybe he doesn't feel like it's worth it to create an all-out extravaganza. And as Gabriel is 53 with a small child, can you really blame him for wanting to go to the director and say, "It's all yours, knock yourself out, call me when you need me for my close-up."

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that I feel that the videos are lacking a bit because of his reduced particpation. Here's hoping that his next video is a little bit more hands-on for him.