RAMBLE ON: "Steam" by Peter Gabriel

“Please stop playing my video,” Peter Gabriel once begged MTV, allegedly. I cannot confirm this apocryphal anecdote, but it’s a story that’s kept circulating because it’s just so plausible. This next fact is also unconfirmed, since MTV never released their data, but Peter Gabriel’s landmark video “Sledgehammer” is widely credited as the most played clip in the network’s history. And really, it deserves to be – 36 years later it’s still an absolute joy to watch. By 1986, the early avant-garde mystique of music video had already been co-opted by mega-stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna, so for one of the original prog-rock weirdos to vault past them into the top spot was an astonishing achievement.

It also surely wasn’t what Peter Gabriel, one of the great oddballs of pop music, could have expected or wanted. It’s always an odd moment when left-of-the-dial artists blow up in the mainstream, and go past alt-success into actual success; Gabriel’s album So, of course featuring the massively overplayed “Sledgehammer,” was a monstrous success. Peter wasn’t trying to avoid hits, obviously, but mostly what he wanted to do is make good music, not be a star. You can always tell who’s prepared to be mega-famous and who isn’t by how they follow it up: An actual pop star will follow it up by doing the same thing bigger, louder and dumber, but the true artistes -- Neil Young, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, REM, Twenty One Pilots, Billie Eilish – they all responded by swerving away from the spotlight, some of them violently. Peter Gabriel followed So by with a non-pop project, composing the score to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. He wouldn’t release a true follow-up for six years, and that album, 1992’s Us, is a distinctly muted affair, containing none of the heavy drama of “Red Rain” or “In Your Eyes” or “Don’t Give Up.”

And so, perhaps as an attempt to break up the dourness or just as a blatant sop to commercialism, we have a couple of pop songs, the first being “Steam,” an undisguised attempt to recapture the glory of “Sledgehammer,” music video included. Though not the first single, it was the biggest hit off the album, and Gabriel’s final top ten hit. Revisiting it thirty years later is a trip. The “Sledgehammer” video is an all-timer – stunningly inventive, endlessly rewatchable, a mastery of the form. In many senses, the “Steam” video is a worthy successor to it; it’s just as visually striking, arguably even more technologically groundbreaking, and constantly swerves into new ideas that give it a healthy amount of replay value. Unlike the “Sledgehammer” video, it is also unfathomably stupid, profoundly embarrassing, and its special effects have aged like a tuna sandwich left in the rain. I’ve known the song for a long time, but only watched the video this week, and I am awestruck at it. What a shitshow.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t know “Sledgehammer” is about sex. I had to have it pointed out to me; something about the song just translates into the brain as pleasant ‘80s nonsense so that its obvious innuendos become easy to miss. The “Steam” video seems to be laser-focused on making sure nobody misses the theme this time around. This song is about fuckin’, everyone! When he says “Give me steam,” that means sex! To make sure this is clear, every scene in the video is horny in one way or another; it starts with Peter Gabriel dressed as a pimp (!!!) and doesn’t improve. From there, Peter Gabriel turns into a naked CGI figure, the first of very many primitive computer animations that were probably amazing at the time and look like garbage now. There’s also a number of times when the imagery gets as literal as possible – “You could have a steam train,” sings Gabriel in “Sledgehammer,” and in the “Steam” video his head gets CGI’ed onto an actual train. He also rocks back in forth with towel-clad models in a wildly seesawing steam room; his CGI-flattened face gets pressed by a steam iron. When Pete sings “You know your stripper from your paint,” his head is green-screened onto a male stripper so that you don’t miss the barely-even-double entendre. In two separate scenes, Gabriel magically strips a girl down to her underwear; in one of them, the girl does it back to him (though, as with the Chippendale dancer earlier, it’s Peter’s face pasted onto a buffer man’s body). The CGI is hideous, and the director seems to be enjoying how ugly it is. Arguably, it’s so bad it’s good -- there’s a sense in which the director is just fucking around with this new tech and doing things wrong on purpose. The whole video is a shitpost, a hilarious DaShareZone meme with enough bloated MTV budget to get all the fanciest SFX 1992 could buy.

It's tempting to say that this video ruins the song but I can’t really say that they’re mismatched. They certainly both carry the same energy – the song is a goof, sexual but not erotic, a silly little lark where a pasty 40-something Brit gets to be funny and romp around pretending to be a hot stud. But that was also the main idea behind “Sledgehammer,” which preceded it and bettered it and only made Peter Gabriel seem even cooler. “Steam” makes Peter Gabriel look like a fucking dork, and the fact that it’s still about 90% as good as “Sledgehammer” – Peter Gabriel is a good artist makes good music – somehow makes the song’s lack of dignity even starker. During his world tour in support of Us, Peter performed the song in an open white shirt in front of blowing air vents that makes him look like a parody of “Black or White”-era Michael Jackson. In other performances at various award shows, including the opening performance of the ’93 Grammys, he did the song wearing the pimp outfit, and he’d rip off his jacket and shirt to reveal a full-on fake-muscles bodysuit. It’s all in good fun, but it’s also more than a little exhausted. It feels only right that Peter Gabriel disappears from the world of popular music after this.

1992, give or take a year, feels like the last gasp of the old guard of ‘80s alternative; the new wavers and art-pop geniuses who led the previous decade – Genesis, Depeche Mode, New Order, the Talking Heads, Sinead O’Connor, The B-52s, Annie Lennox, The Cure, the Psychedelic Furs, Tears for Fears, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the granddaddy of them all David Bowie -- all make their final stabs at being relevant hitmakers before entering the legacy-artist phase of their careers. Gabriel himself wouldn’t re-emerge for a decade and now only occasionally pops out new music when he feels like it. I want to repeat that “Steam” is a good song, it’s fun and it’s catchy and enjoyable, but it also feels right that it’s been forgotten whereas “Sledgehammer” lives on. If you listen to the shitty hairmetal of the early ‘90s, you immediately get the sense that it’s time to move on, and even though “Steam” is a much better song than, say, “Unskinny Bop,” you can see where this led to grunge just as much as Poison. The ‘90s would be very good for jokey alt-rock too, but it would be a much different kind. Peter Gabriel was now very middle-aged, and it was time for Beck, Pavement, Bjork and entire new generation of surrealist envelope-pushers to take over.