Peter Gabriel’s ‘So’: The prog album that will get you into the genre
Of all the great offshoots of rock and roll, prog rock was always going to be a tricky beast for anyone to get on board with. Not everyone’s going to connect with songs over ten minutes that tell elaborate stories, but there are always those few records that can make the best first impression for the genre.
Because if you show someone the wrong prog album to start out with, chances are they might be running scared from the whole thing by the time that the album is over. Close to the Edge might be one of the most celebrated prog albums of all time, but it’s not like any prospective fan of Yes is going to automatically love an album that’s based on the first 20-minute track based on the book Siddhartha.
But we can’t really cheat the system here, either. We’re looking for an honest-to-God prog artist here, and while Pet Sounds was the first pop album that helped progress the genre forward, it’s not like Brian Wilson was thinking in those terms. This has to be coming from the prog world, but there are moments where prog started to extend an olive branch to fans wanting to listen to a few decent pop tunes.
Hell, in the 1980s alone, some of the biggest prog acts had their greatest successes thanks to them being ahead of the curve with keyboards. Rush had ‘Tom Sawyer’ on the radio, Yes was getting a major boost thanks to ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’, but whereas a band like Genesis was leaning fully into pop music with Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel’s So remains one of the greatest blends of prog and pop ever created.
While Gabriel never sought out to be a pop star, every piece of his fifth album takes the bones of pop music and brings complex arrangements around them. The melodies are already solid on tracks like ‘Red Rain’, but the more you dig into every track, the more you start to realise the layers that are put into every tune. It’s not an accident that he got people like Tony Levin in the studio to play bass, and he delivers a masterclass on prog bass playing on tracks like ‘Big Time’ and ‘Sledgehammer’.
Although many people remember the hits from the record for a reason, what makes them all stand out is how different they seem to be from each other. ‘In Your Eyes’ is still one of the greatest love songs ever conceived, and with no offense meant to Phil Collins, ‘Sledgehammer’ is a far greater soulful rock number than ‘Sussudio’ could have ever been. Not every song needed to be as thoughtful or cerebral as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but that was never the point.
This was the ultimate middle ground between Gabriel as the art-rock weirdo and the 1980s pop star he had inside him all along. And for everyone interested in peeling back the layers of a song like ‘Don’t Give Up’ or immerse themselves in the mood of tracks like ‘Mercy Street’, it’s not that hard for them to eventually dip their toes into songs that are a bit more complex and eventually discovering acts like King Crimson and Kate Bush and Genesis if they want to.
So never sought out to be a gamechanging album by any stretch, but Gabriel wasn’t planning on “selling out” for the hell of it once the 1980s kicked in. The chances he took here were as daring as any of his previous albums, and while he never really returned to these same heights again, it’s saying something about an artist’s talent when the mainstream ends up coming to them.
