More Than This

Soundtrack: Peter Gabriel - One By One (Dark-Side Mix)

The description on Peter Gabriel's website reads:

Peter Gabriel is best known as a musician. He started his solo work in 1975 after leaving his old school group: Genesis. He has released eleven solo albums and written soundtracks for three films. Peter is now writing and recording, and working on a plan to create a streaming service for digital medicine and an Interspecies Internet.

Best known as a musician is such a wild description, but it's fair, for a man whose long career includes fighting Apartheid when it was unfashionable to do so, and never wavering on his conviction that justice should be for all people. He started Witness, a global program that feels like the predecessor to today's smartphone filming of oppression. Document and spread awareness, put public pressure on officials to take action and protect peace. Peter's Real World Records uplifts voices from across the globe in a celebration of diversity, collective dialogue, and shared rhythms. On stage, he never fails to name and cheer for every member of his band, because they are not mere background players for him but irreplaceable friends.

His latest work, the album i/o, is about interaction and connection, in particular the relationships we have with each other, with family, our place in nature, and with our old friend death. In his song "So Much", he sings "this edition is limited." Yeah. Each of us, we're limited editions for sure. I could go on about how great the album is, but what I really want to talk about is the consistent through-line of his career in music in the theme of letting things go, moving on, and finding peace in the act of putting aside concerns to seek out deeper connections and meaning. From "Solsbury Hill", a song that feels to me like the ultimate triumphal breakup track sung at his former Genesis bandmates, to i/o's "Live and Let Live", he's always been exploring the emotional corridors of burden and how they open up when one pushes down the walls and lets go of baggage. "You can keep my things, they've come to take me home." In "I Grieve", the song opens as a lament for what was lost, but pivots to a celebration of the life that goes on regardless of death. In "Here Comes The Flood", "we will say goodbye to flesh and blood" is sung with acceptance and grace. Song after song, Peter grapples with age, with cultural wrongs to be overcome, with sex and sexuality free from stigma (as in "Steam", "Sledgehammer", "Blood of Eden", and "Road to Joy") politics and self-reflection. His is a body of work that breathes and beats a rhythm warm and vibrant as the human body itself.

In so many songs, he encourages the listener to, as sung in "Been Undone" off the new o/i record, "listen and feel." Nowhere in his music are others put down, or brags lodged in the name of possessions, power, or fame.

This is a person who works with celebrated artists to create pieces for each of his songs. He doesn't succumb to the AI slop delusion that's plaguing the world right now like a fever, a cyclosporaisis of the mind. Every new moon, he releases a new song, like some witchy magician of eld, and I am here for it. It's slow media, which I've written about before. Not to be seen and used-up all at once, but explored one room at a time. Each song with its own artwork. Each with a short video about the process, or what's going on in the world. Still protesting injustice, still fighting for connection.

I just wanted to publish this piece to shout out my favorite artist. If anyone can truly create an "Interspecies Internet", it'll be someone like Peter Gabriel, not Sam Altman or any of those tech fascists in Silicon Valley. They want to surveil our every move and sell us to the highest bidder; Peter wants to surveil evil and send out the signal as loud as he can so that collectively, we can point and say, there—there it is, and put a stop to it. They want to remove human emotion and connection from art and replace us with bot slop. Peter wants people to reach out and cross barriers, sing and dance, and "lay the burden down".

From his new song, "One by One":

Yet I could be standing at the pole, If I learn to be still,
to be quiet for a moment, to silence the will
Swept away from the center, by the warm centrifuge,
I was hot I was cold I was small I was huge
What is and what isn't, what wants to exist
Was there on the island that had formed in the mist,
And the contract was signed, in the darkest red ink
And the bridges all appeared, that opened up the link
To the other world that had grown in my mind
And I caught sight of the ocean that lies right behind,
I was looking for admission, and fighting for a place
But wherever my gaze fell, I could make out your face
Coming back, getting together, holding your hand
Holding your hand

I love this image of the man who is an island finding connection, reforging what was lost after war or trauma and the loss of his home. Especially the "warm centrifuge" of being loved by one's neighbors, the press and touch and spinning celebration of human bodies there to support their stricken companion, whom they had just met. How through his emotional turmoil he finds something solid to hold onto, a recognized face and a renewed connection to someone dear despite the letting go, the leaving of the burden of perhaps a bombed-out town he had walked away from as one of the survivors, the leaving behind the guilt of survival and the rage of revenge unfinished. These songs are for this time, while also looking ahead.

Peter is someone who has looked out past the challenges with hope, inspired others and lifted them up, and continues to build a world that is better, without invoking religion or members-only groups, a world he sees that's More than this.