round 1

(7) DEVO, “SATISFACTION”
BEAT
(10) PETER GABRIEL, “HEROES”
IF JUST FOR ONE DAY
303-259
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/9/22.

erin belieu on Devo’s “Satisfaction”

It’s October 14th, 1978, Omaha, Nebraska, and I’ve been a teenager just shy of three weeks.
It’s the year I begin creeping down to the TV room once my parents are in bed, sitting in my dad’s surpassingly ugly recliner, smoking the leftover ends of the four cigarettes that framed his after-supper ritual: four Larks, four Triscuits, each topped with a sweaty square of Colby cheese, and four Manhattans.
By 10pm, I knew he and my mom (with her own best time in this nightly liquid marathon) couldn’t clock an oom-pah band marching through the house. I’ve come down this evening to watch Saturday Night Live. For a girl living in the Brigadoon-like mists of Nebraska, my weekly illicit viewings of SNL are proof of life.
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that being thirteen sucks. Or it should be. I still recall the intensity of how terrible it feels to be that age. The enraging in-betweenness of it—too young for the older kids to bother with, but a galaxy beyond the babies you’re stuck “watching” at the card table end of Thanksgiving.
I’ll make the further case that being thirteen in 1978 was above average terrible: economy tanked, oil prices stratospheric, the Cold War still slouching on, a machine whose reason or purpose no one seemed to remember; Son of Sam’s trial on the nightly news, and that terrible picture on the cover of Time magazine, countless bodies splayed where they’d dropped after drinking the purple Kool Aid.
1978 also wins for peak divorce rate in America. Whatever spackle held the grown-ups together had rotted away over the course of the decade, as more and more of my friends were contractually obligated to spend weekends sleeping at their fathers’ divorce-sad one-bedroom apartments. Moms now had boyfriends, sketchy guys with receding hairlines named Denny and Cliff. Two of the kids in my neighborhood had uncles living in their basements, soldiers come home but not quite returned from Vietnam.
And the music. Uff. It was bleak from my position—that is, as a white girl from a suburban family barely clinging to the middle class, raised in an aggressively segregated midwestern city. I caught flashes on the periphery (from American Bandstand and Soul Train on Saturday mornings) that something musically vital was happening somewhere, but it wasn’t music to which I had real access back in the informational Before Times.
I had the soporifically wholesome stylings of “the Ol’ Redhead” Don Cole on KFAB AM radio announcing the treacly ballads that defined that year in pop music, a slough of already overplayed rock “classics,” the Gibb brothers’ Hydra-headed disco juggernaut, and the “Desperado” singer-songwriters whose stale “You know I gotta ramble, girl” machismo hit me as up its own ass even at that tender age. A perfume capturing the mainstream musical essence of 1978 in America would contain notes of ditch weed, Velveeta casserole, and polyester slacks (worn commando).
So I’m sitting in my dad’s chair smoking butts and regretting my nascent life when SNL’s host Fred Willard announces that week’s musical guest, some unknown band called Devo that in the next couple minutes will permanently alter how I perceive…well, everything.
As is true of any wildly original art that kicks the door open for much of what follows, the event of Devo’s appearance that night (back when we had three channels to choose from, and maybe PBS if you got the TV antenna pointed just right), this happening live on nationwide TV—it’s hard capture the super-size audacity of their performance in our present time when you can experience everything anywhere always.
The danger-yellow biohazard suits, the evil-toy choreography—they looked like animatronic aliens who’d landed their spaceship in the uncanny valley. With unfashionably lean and punchy drums (especially compared to the era’s prog rock behemoths) and rhythm guitars laying out a tweaky, industrial through line, the song’s opening bars have more in common with Antheil’s score for Ballet Mécanique than anything the American public identified as a pop music at that point in history.
It’s not until Mark Mothersbaugh rips into his sugar-cereal amped version of the iconic hook of “Satisfaction” that you recognize this controlled demolition as a cover of one of the world’s most famous songs. The glitching robot vocals (Mothersbaugh spitting his famous “babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby” line like a possessed gumball machine), Gerald Casale’s boingy, Looney Tunes bass putting the party in the proceedings—they were the exact musical definition of “WTF??”; a weirdo bolt of lightning that shook the audience to their boogie (oogie oogie) shoes. It took Devo a little over two ferociously tight and catchy minutes that night to plant their harpoon in the bloated, boring, and twee nonsense clogging the airwaves at the time.

While our subject is cover songs, I’ll admit I have a hard time calling Devo’s version of “Satisfaction” a cover. That’s a toothless word for the Derridean surgery they perform on The Stones’ charismatic, seductive but ultimately backward-facing original. As T.S. Eliot said—who knew from demolishing traditions—“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
By this standard, Devo’s futuristic deconstruction of “Satisfaction” works as a crime-of-the-decade heist, hijacking the Stones’ song into something indelibly and completely their own. Respect to Mick Jagger for approving their use of the song, but what Devo does to “Satisfaction” has no basis in homage. The bluesy, roadhouse sex appeal that defines the Stones’ music is ruptured unto death by Devo’s mordantly playful amalgamation of Dadaism, Nihilistic philosophy, postmodern satire, and sci-fi kitsch, pressurized into the ear wiggy-ness of the corporate jingle structures they origamied into scathingly political pop music. And beneath the performance art drag, Devo had the added virtue of looking completely ordinary to their audience, genetic “spuds” as they called themselves—nothing like the sex panthers, renaissance fair troubadours and Valhalla cosplayers folks were used to. For all their obvious smarts and art house surreality, Devo was appealingly DIY for the kids who discovered them that night, both musically and visually; non-descript dudes indistinguishable from the college guys sacking groceries at my local Hinky Dinky. 
Of course, I didn’t have any of this language or context at 13, only a freshly minted teenager’s heat seeking radar for music so fresh and exciting—SO FUCKING NEW—that it left me slightly alarmed, disturbingly aroused and usefully confused. And I wasn’t alone.
Soon after their appearance on SNL, some of the certifiably coolest boys at the neighborhood high school covered Devo’s “Satisfaction” at the annual talent show causing a joyous riot that became immediate legend every kid in town heard about. A friend of mine, a well-known novelist (name redacted for the sake of personal dignity), told me after seeing their SNL performance he immediately dismantled his shower curtain and wore it around his tiny, conservative hometown to feel “Devo-esque,” despite the serious abuse he took from the normie kids (and proving once again being in the vanguard isn’t for the weak). My response was to start regularly pedaling my bike the 4 miles (uphill! Without permission!) to the closest record store, using my chore money to raid the bins for music I learned was called “New Wave”: Elvis Costello, B-52s, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, Blondie (and bless you, Chrissie & Debbie, for showing me women were damn well included too).
Seemingly overnight, it was a glorious time to be thirteen.
It’s a mystery to me and no small shame that on a recent stroll through the Internet I found surprisingly few “10 Greatest Covers of All-Time” lists that include Devo’s “Satisfaction.” I don’t even understand how that’s possible.
For many music nerds and budding musicians, Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” was a seminal moment in their early lives, a Schedule 1 introduction leading directly to the dive clubs and rumpus rooms of punk and new wave that would quickly infiltrate and reshape music worldwide.
Maybe Devo is considered more “performance art” than music to your more parochial sorts? Too equally committed to the satiric videos (MTV soon made ubiquitous) for the crankier purists to approve? Perhaps some simply take a pass on their music’s avant-garde complexities and experimentation?
Or maybe Devo is ultimately too Cassandra-like for some list makers with their upsettingly unsentimental “Jocko Homo” critique of post human devolution, zombie consumerism, and cannibalistic capitalism? I mean, nobody’s gonna vote Devo’s music most likely to get you laid.
I suppose this last reason makes the most sense to me. Little more than a year after Devo’s performance of “Satisfaction” on SNL, Ronald Reagan (*shudder*) won the presidency, ejaculating a backlash of fifties nostalgia porn as cultural “corrective” to the “dangerous” ideas unleashed by the Civil Rights, LGBTQIA+ and Women’s Liberation movements. During Reagan’s first administration, it remains in memory the only time I ever openly swore at my father—a public school administrator—paradoxically dedicated to working in lower income schools for 40 years—who ended up voting for Reagan not once, but twice. “WHY DON’T YOU JUST SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FUCKING HEAD, DAD? IT’D BE A LOT QUICKER.”
So the great and greedy sleep of white America recommenced in the 80s with a revenant’s vengeance. In his second term, Ol’ Purplehead openly trolled the nation, using Bruce Springsteen’s obviously and indisputably brutal “Born In The USA” as his feel good campaign song while Alex P. Keaton clones were more than satisfied to dance along mindlessly in their whale print turtlenecks and Topsiders.
It’s hard not to think the human devolution Devo informed us of starting in the late 70s is all but complete in the apocalypse-adjacent aftermath of another racist, bigoted, and corrupt D-List actor’s presidency. That night on SNL, Devo delivered a message to the nation—a musical harbinger of the future soon to come--but hasn’t this always been America’s most singularly defining feature—not hearing what we don’t want to hear?
(“Freedom from choice, it’s what we want.”)

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including 2021's Come-Hither Honeycomb. Recent work has appeared in the New York Times, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, and Kenyon Review. Belieu lives in Houston where she teaches for the University of Houston's MFA/Ph.D. program in Creative Writing.

75 Propositions (and an Interlude) Regarding “‘Heroes’” by David Bowie and Brian Eno, as Performed by Peter Gabriel: an Essay by Martin Seay

I) Why Record a Cover?

1) Just to prove you can do it, for starters. To figure out how it was made, how it works. To assure prospective employers that when you play “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the wedding reception, people will be able to recognize it. To get famous on the internet.

2) If you’re an artist who releases original material, your calculus may be different. Your cover may be a way of paying tribute to an inspiration or an influence. Or you might do it to assert your cred, to demonstrate your good taste, or to declare an aesthetic allegiance: think of Joni Mitchell’s version of “Twisted,” or Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” or the Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle,” or Yaeji’s “Passionfruit.”

3) If you’re a mid-career artist with an established following, your cover might elevate an original from relative obscurity, as Louis Armstrong did with “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“Mack the Knife”), or Emmylou Harris did with “Pancho and Lefty,” or Annie Lennox did with “No More ‘I Love You’s.’” Or it might introduce your loyal fans to a niche favorite they’d otherwise have paid little mind: see Jimmy Buffett’s “Pacing the Cage,” or the Chicks’ “Let Him Fly,” or No Doubt’s “It’s My Life.”

4) None of these approaches requires you to substantially rework the source material: you can just play it straight. Things get more interesting if you not only present a song to a new audience, but also transfer it into a new genre or idiom—as in, say, Duke Ellington’s The Nutcracker Suite, or Selena’s take on “Back on the Chain Gang” (“Fotos y Recuerdos”), or Ministry’s “Lay Lady Lay.”

5) Now we’re entering I-see-what-you-did-there territory: the domain of covers as covers, where the audience is meant to be familiar enough with the original to recognize and appreciate modifications. Musicians and their hip coterie have played this game among themselves since forever, particularly in jazz, but to function at scale this type of cover depends on the sort of vibrant, technologically-mediated global popular culture that didn’t really emerge until the 1960s, thanks to transistor radios and high-wattage stations and TV and the fact that there were suddenly a hell of a lot of teenagers around.

6) Here’s a tenuous assertion just to stir shit up: the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” is the first cover song. Yeah yeah yeah, of course there were a million earlier instances of artists recording new versions of existing material, but that’s my point: the practice was so common that the average listener didn’t need a word for it, a way to talk about it. And sure, there’d been earlier songwriters who’d had pop hits both with their own and with borrowed material, but the public generally regarded them either as technicians (Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, Gene Pitney) or as novelty acts who’d slipped into the pop charts from the grittier hinterlands of folk, country, and R&B (Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye). Then the Beatles showed up—cute young white guys exhibiting both the hit-crafting chops of the former group and the rough immediacy (signifying authenticity) of the latter—and old divisions started to collapse. “Twist” was one of several compositions by others that the Fab Four recorded for Please Please Me, partly because they hadn’t yet written an album’s worth of their own stuff. In those days it was common for young groups to put a few familiar tunes on their LPs to ease the concerns of hesitant buyers, and people already kind of knew “Twist” from the Isley Brothers’ version. But by the time the Beatles’ single dropped in the spring of 1964, the lads had already had a string of runaway hits with their own songs, Beatlemania was well underway, and reassuring prospective fans was no longer necessary. Their cover of “Twist and Shout” now meant, and did, something else.

7) What it meant was that a band that didn’t need to record songs by other people had done so anyway. What it did was open new interpretive routes between the artist, the audience, and the material. The recorded cover didn’t just function as a one-way conduit between the band and its listeners; it was also wired—by way of the cryptic intentionality of the artist’s choices—to the listeners’ prior knowledge of the covered song, a knowledge that artists could activate and exploit if they chose to do so. When an audience is able to hear cover versions not only as attempts to score hits, but also as expressions of artists’ interests and values, then the distance between the artists and the audience shrinks, with the artists now inhabiting an intermediate double position: at once sharing the audience’s giddy fandom for established stars and standing among those stars as their peers.

8) Although “Twist and Shout” introduced the cover song as we know it today, the category didn’t really take shape as its own thing, with its own qualities and conventions, until the Big Three of Bob Dylan adaptations came along: the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” in ’65, Stevie Wonder’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in ’66, and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” in ’68. By then Dylan had himself shifted in the public’s consciousness from a weird acerbic folkie whose stuff might be rendered palatable by Peter, Paul and Mary to somebody who could land a six-minute song with no bridge near the top of the Billboard Hot 100. The default expectation that serious, respectable artists won’t write their own material was gone, replaced by a default expectation that they will. Barring occasional dissents, that expectation remains with us, which means that this understanding of covers and how they operate remains with us too, further amplified and complicated across the decades by MIDI, sampling, the internet, smartphones, social media, streaming, and whatever the next thing is.

9) I am now obliged to acknowledge the basic poststructuralist point that just as writing is always also reading, making music is always also listening to music. That like any text, a song is—as Julia Kristeva might put it—“a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.” That every note, chord, rhythm, tempo, or timbre has a history that the audience can hear, and is always referring to that history, and in fact probably depends on those references to be intelligible as music. That therefore, in some sense and at some level, every song is a cover.

10) This humming feedback loop vastly multiplies what a cover as such can do. Artists can, for instance, use it to generate layers of irony, layers that may be absent from the performance itself, emerging only in the gap the listener recognizes between the cover and the original. Examples of this approach, while typologically noteworthy, are usually not super-interesting once you get past the joke (and often even the joke’s not that good): Dynamite Hack’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” hard-rock cover albums by Pat Boone and Paul Anka, Postmodern Jukebox’s charming but gimmicky time-machine takes on rock and pop hits. (I’ll spare you the links.) In rarer cases irony is just a starting point, and the cover becomes something more than a gag: Lyle Lovett’s “Stand by Your Man,” Sonic Youth’s “Superstar,” the Gourds’ “Gin and Juice,” Frank Ocean’s “Moon River.”

11) Ironic covers usually work at the coverer’s own expense, the punchline being that the artist is in over their head, unworthy of or ill-suited to the material, or that they’ve intentionally missed its point. But these covers can also be skeptical, or straightforwardly oppositional: Jimi Hendrix’s evocation of latent violence in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Negativland’s call of bullshit on U2’s grandiosity in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” the Beastie Boys’ and Biz Markie’s demonstration of the irrelevance of the lyrics to “Bennie and the Jets.” Sometimes the artist delivers the critique just by removing the material from its original context, an I’m-just-gonna-say-that-back-you approach: Veruca Salt’s “My Sharona,” Tori Amos’s “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” Cécile McLorin Salvant’s “Wives and Lovers.”

12) What’s most compelling to me, and for some reason most affecting, is when a cover seems intended to advocate on the song’s behalf, to show that it contains possibilities that weren’t fully expressed in prior recordings. Of his version of “Downtown Train,” Rod Stewart once said, “I thought I heard a melody that Tom wasn’t singing”; although I much prefer Tom Waits’ original, I’ve always liked how Stewart phrased that.

13) The most obvious way to perform this kind of advocacy is to play a stripped-, slowed-, and/or quieted-down version of a club banger or a rock ’n’ roll stomp, in order to highlight the underappreciated elegance of the unadorned melody; Travis’s “…Baby One More Time,” Michael Andrews’ and Gary Jules’ “Mad World,” José González’s “Heartbeats,” and Squirrel Flower’s “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” all basically fit this mold. (Such covers risk seeming presumptuous when the songs are already doing fine on their own; see Ryan Adams’ 1989.)

14) An artist might also take the opposite approach, exploding a song’s apparent simplicity to find out what else it can support or contain: John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” John Martyn’s Echoplex-y take on “Devil Got My Woman,” Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Little Wing,” Jeff Buckley’s “The Way Young Lovers Do.”

15) There are even admirably perverse attempts to make new versions of music that seems impossible to cover—usually electronic compositions or musique concrète, pieces for which the processes of writing, performing, and recording can’t easily be disentangled—in order to make their forbidding soundscapes more permeable to listeners, sort of like jailbreaking a smartphone: see the Bad Plus’s jazz-trio take on Aphex Twin’s drum-and-bass, Alarm Will Sound’s chamber-orchestra joyride through Autechre’s glitchy polyrhythms, Chet Faker’s bluesy interpretation of Burial’s haunted dubstep, and Zeitkratzer’s unplugged version of Lou Reed’s notorious feedback-and-tape epic Metal Machine Music.

16) To my way of thinking, covers tend to work best when their aims are modest and constructive, meant to draw out a specific quality or fix a specific problem. Elvis Costello, for instance, could tell that Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” is a great song, but that the existing recorded version, which skated between wistful and winking, didn’t quite work; Costello pushed the tempo, cut the irony, poured on the righteous anger, and made it a classic. Jeff Buckley did something comparable with “Hallelujah,” essentially flipping the melancholy–sarcastic ratio of Leonard Cohen’s original. Lyle Lovett’s excellent version of “Friend of the Devil” is premised simply on his conviction that the Grateful Dead’s is “too happy.”

17) Sometimes it’s just a matter of an artist recognizing that a song will work better or mean more if they perform it. The rough template here is probably “My Way”—although in that case Paul Anka always intended it to be sung by Frank Sinatra as he was writing the lyrics. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards dressed up their junkie dissipation in Gram Parsons’ Nudie suit, but when Townes Van Zant sings their “Dead Flowers,” there’s no cosplay involved. Trent Reznor is a genius and all, but a song that he recorded while moping around the Tate–LaBianca murder house in black latex sounds very different when performed by a terminally-ill Johnny Cash, as “Hurt” attests. While it’s tough to improve on the original, Angélique Kidjo’s pan-Afrofuturist elaboration of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” certainly takes it into new places. The Pixies’ fantasy of identification with a subarctic hoofed ruminant works just fine on its own, but “Caribou” rings additional bells when performed by Tanya Tagaq. And so forth.

18) Something we can state categorically about these recordings is that they always involve bridging gaps and transgressing boundaries: little ones between individual artists, big ones between races, ethnicities, languages, classes, genders, sexualities, generations, geographies, whatever you got. That sounds more straightforward than it is. When we talk about recorded covers, we’re dealing with a set of consumer products that is inextricably linked to the midcentury practice of recording different versions of the same tune to sell to different groups, with the difference in question, of course, very often being racial. And the whitewashing of songs by African-American musicians is a de facto extension of blackface minstrelsy, an exploitative and multifarious tradition that is rather awkwardly the root of a ton of American and global popular culture.

19) For a long time, covers functioned principally as a means of maintaining and profiting from racial segregation. At some point in the mid-1950s the balance began to tip, and they became vehicles for productive and respectful communication across difference. But the old ghosts are still there, and the possibility of acting in bad faith emerges every time an artist steps into a recording booth to sing another’s work, as do opportunities for empathy, generosity, and respectful tribute. Since every song is made of other songs, this remains the case even when the covering artist and the artist being covered share similar demographic traits.

20) I’m not going to try to convince you that Peter Gabriel’s version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” is the best cover of all time; that’s probably Aretha Franklin’s version of “Respect.” And it’s not my favorite cover of all time; that’s probably Shawn Colvin’s version of “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody).” But it’s the one that’s most interesting to me, the one I really want to talk to you about. And this, I’m afraid, feels like the only right way to do it: to talk around it and circle in, to place it in a field. This music has a lot of other music in it.

II) David Bowie

21) At the beginning of 1976—a few weeks before the release of his album Station to Station and the start of the associated Isolar tour, a few months before the premiere of the film The Man Who Fell to Earth in which he played the titular extraterrestrial—David Bowie was in the grip of a spiraling cocaine addiction, living in Los Angeles. Bowie was renowned for adopting personae for his tours, and for Isolar he chose to present himself as the Thin White Duke, a cadaverous, dissipated aristocrat; during various engagements with the press he made statements advocating fascism, and the extent to which these remarks were intended merely as theater was never clear. (Given his state at the time, it apparently wasn’t clear to Bowie either. He did, I should note, retract these statements once he got clean; in the meantime they became one of the inciting incidents of the Rock Against Racism movement.) A number of circumstantial and personal factors contributed to Bowie’s coke habit, but he concluded that a big part of the problem was just being in Los Angeles. When Isolar ended, he relocated to Europe: first to Switzerland, then to West Berlin.

22) Much of what drew Bowie to Berlin was a rather juvenile fascination with Weimar decadence and fascist glamor, a fascination very much in evidence on Station to Station. The album was a chilly departure from the atypically R&B-inflected sound of its predecessor, Young Americans—though Bowie had famously characterized the latter as “plastic soul,” an exercise in pastiche: “the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock,” he told Playboy, “written and sung by a white limey.” Station to Station gives the impression that Bowie is no longer faking, that he’s plunging into darkness at the heart of European culture, even though (or maybe because) the unfathomable monstrousness of which that culture was capable had become all too clear. Bowie’s lyrics, scattered with references to Nietzsche, narcotics, and occultism, seemed to suggest that the Enlightenment tradition was in the process of self-destructing, quietly bleeding out, which might be the best outcome for it. “It's too late, it's too late, it's too late, it's too late,” Bowie sings on the album’s title track, “the European canon is here.”

23) But what Bowie found in Berlin wasn’t Weimar decadence or fascist glamor. What he found, more or less, were hippies: groups of musicians, many of whom had been involved in the student protests of 1968, who now sought honest, fruitful, practical methods of composing and performing that avoided both the nationalistic clichés of the German music that had preceded them and the commercialistic clichés of the American and British rock ’n’ roll brought by occupying forces. The new approach consisted largely of trying to do without things: blues licks, backbeats, verse–chorus structures, pretty chord changes. Influences from outside the scene were okay, provided they didn’t come with too much baggage; interest ran high in tape manipulation, synthesizers, free jazz, psychedelia, patterns, pulses, and drones. For artists from nations that had prevailed in the war, a little morbid wallowing was okay, maybe even a good counterweight to triumphalism, but for Germans—particularly those in West Berlin, a gray industrial enclave a hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain—the priority was making something new. In keeping with the emphasis on novelty, just about all of these musicians were resistant to naming the music that they were making, or indeed agreeing that it all belonged in the same category, so it ended up saddled with a tag coined in the British press: krautrock.

24) Station to Station already shows signs of this music’s influence, but Bowie’s immersion in it deepened after his move to Europe. Self-sequestration was part of the point of being in Berlin, and Bowie’s actual collaboration with German musicians was minimal to nil, but he was clearly listening and incorporating what he heard, starting with his production duties on his friend Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot. (Pop also moved to Berlin for the same reason Bowie did, to get his substance issues under control; they were roommates for a while.) The Idiot sessions gave Bowie the opportunity to try out new methods that he used on his own next album, including a process of building songs by recording rhythm tracks and other instrumental accompaniment before writing lyrics or vocal melodies. He brought his frequent co-producer Tony Visconti on board; he also extended an invitation to Brian Eno, whom he knew to be interested in the new German music. (Eno had already established his own connection to the scene, collaborating briefly with krautrock supergroup Harmonia, an experience that informed his approach to ambient music.) Although recording mostly took place in France, the resulting album—much of it devoid of intelligible lyrics and conventional song structures—is steeped in a very krautrock-flavored experimentalism. While mostly ignored upon its release, Low now looms as a major postpunk landmark, a work that musicians are still in the process of fully digesting.

25) Bowie was pleased enough with the result to convene pretty much the same group of collaborators the following year: Visconti, Eno, guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis, along with a new recruit, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. This time the sessions took place entirely in Berlin, at a studio within sight of the Wall. The album they recorded would be called “Heroes”.

III) “‘Heroes’”

26) First, about those quotation marks. They’re in the title: meant to “indicate a dimension of irony about the word ‘heroes’ or about the whole concept of heroism,” as Bowie helpfully informed the NME. So when I put “Heroes” in italics I’m talking about the album, and when I put “‘Heroes’” in roman type with single quotes inside double quotes I’m talking about the title song. Cool? Cool! 

27) Eno took a bigger role in the “Heroes” sessions, helping the musicians keep their ideas fresh—sometimes by using the Oblique Strategies cards he’d created with visual artist Peter Schmidt—and he’s credited as the co-writer of four songs, “‘Heroes’” among them. As in the Low sessions, most songs generally began with Alomar, Murray, Davis, and Bowie laying down backing tracks, over which Eno and Fripp respectively dubbed synthesizer and electric guitar. Working quickly, Bowie would write and sing the lyrics, sometimes coming up with a line and recording it before writing and singing the next, plugging them in one at a time on successive playbacks.

28) The song title came first; Bowie later applied it to the whole album. Intriguingly, he seems to have started calling the song “‘Heroes’” before he’d written any of its lyrics. How come? Maybe he’d just heard something anthemic in those early rhythm tracks. It’s also pretty likely that it reminded him of the Neu! song “Hero,” a two-chord proto-punk bop similarly haloed in cosmic synths; it’s even possible that he specifically directed the band to come up with something that sounded like “Hero.” In any event, the quotation marks give the title the sense of something Bowie doesn’t fully want to own, a corner he painted himself into: a placeholder that he worked into the lyrics on the spur of the moment and got stuck with forever.

29) Although “‘Heroes’” is straightforward rock-’n’-roll, it contains elements of sublime strangeness that make it admirably hard to get comfortable with. One of these is Eno’s portable EMS synthesizer, which swooshes and moans alongside the chug-chug of the rhythm section; the other is Fripp’s keening guitar, its signal further modified by passing through Eno’s synth. As the lore has it, Fripp employed one of the two studio innovations for which “‘Heroes’” is known: instead of playing notes just by plucking or tapping his strings, he marked spots on the floor at various distances from his amplifier where he’d get feedback of certain pitches, and he crafted his solos by stepping from one spot to another, letting the guitar play itself. The result is a piercing tone that seems to enter from a parallel universe; it rings through the song like no sound produced by human hands, which to some extent it wasn’t.

30) The other studio innovation was Visconti’s idea to set up three microphones to record Bowie’s vocal: one right in front of him, one halfway across the large room, and one all the way on the opposite side. Visconti put noise gates on the two more distant mics—electronic controls that prevented them from picking up sounds below a certain volume—so that the middle one would only catch Bowie when he was really projecting, and the far one wouldn’t kick in unless he was practically screaming. Visconti also rigged the two nearer mics to mute as soon as the noise gate on the next one opened, which meant that the louder Bowie sang, the less the mics caught.  Furthermore, the more distant mics also picked up more room echo along with his voice, so by the time the song is ending Bowie sounds like he’s sinking into something, being dragged down to hell.

31) Even without the lyrics, the arrangement suggests a narrative: a desperate individual beset by sub- and superhuman adversaries, first struggling for dignity, then for survival. The scything synth and guitar feedback might stand in for the alien, impassive sweep of history, or politics, or economics, forces invisible in their vastness; the rhythm tracks are close enough to the freight-train groove of the blues to trigger customary associations with psychological drives, impulses that confirm our status as soft machines. That interpretation probably sounds rote, and it is, but it also lines up with statements Bowie made during the Young Americans sessions—his first collaboration with Alomar and Davis—to the effect that he wanted authentic R&B players to accompany his “plastic” soul. (It is not entirely accidental that the only three people of color hired to play on “Heroes” were the rhythm section.)

32) Bowie’s lyrics for “‘Heroes’” rank among his best, obliquely evoking both the West Berlin setting and the slow-motion collapse of his first marriage. He gives each line plenty of breathing room, and the language is clear and direct, though artful ellipses and ambiguous shifts in mood still leave the listener with plenty to do: the song rewards close reading without ever totally surrendering to it. While its content seems personal and deeply felt, it also seems to proceed according to a haunted interior logic of repetition with slight variations, the sort of formulae that we find in old folk and blues songs, music with no original author that speaks for no individual subjectivity. Rhymes appear in unexpected places, with the second line of the first verse, “you, you will be queen,” warping and wilting into the first line of the second, “you, you can be mean.” Other permutations follow, with “though nothing will drive them away” becoming “though nothing will keep us together,” and finally “we’re nothing, and nothing can help us.”

33) Let’s go back to “you, you can be mean,” a line that’s just about perfect in its vulnerability and pathos. It’s also perfectly sung, with that wounded, exasperated little break where the comma is: the key moment in the song, the point at which Bowie sets its emotional baseline. In that light, we understand the sentimental images that follow as the narrator’s attempts to ward off creeping hopelessness and inadequacy: a fantasy of swimming dolphins (evidently drawn from a story by Alberto Denti di Pirajno; I always picture a Lisa Frank t-shirt) and a memory (or another fantasy) of better times with his partner, when their connection seemed urgent and dangerous, like that of lovers separated by the Wall. The fact that these expressions of defiant grandiosity are bookended by a suffocating sense of doom makes them deeply sad instead of silly. It’s a great goddamn song.

34) It’s also not the “‘Heroes’” that most people heard. As it appears on the album, the final version is a little over six minutes long. If you’re not Bob Dylan and it’s not 1965, landing a six-minute song with no bridge on the pop charts is a tall order, and Bowie had already been making his record label nervous. (Low was marginally commercially successful, but the jury was out as to whether that was because of or despite its weirdness; Bowie had also declined to tour behind it, opting instead to go on the road as Iggy Pop’s keyboardist.) Somebody decided, almost certainly correctly, that “‘Heroes’” was the track on “Heroes” most likely to get played at the roller rink, and figured that its odds of success would be upped if it were quite a bit shorter. That’s how we got the procrustean version of “‘Heroes’” that was released as a single to retailers and radio stations in September 1977:

35) This edit is not exactly a work of technical wizardry: they just removed the first two minutes and the last forty seconds, and left the rest as-is. As a result, “you can be mean” and “I’ll drink all the time” and “we’re lovers, and that is that” vanished from the front end, while “we’re nothing, and nothing will help us / maybe we’re lying, then you better not stay” got lopped off the back. What remains is swimming dolphins, lovers kissing as though nothing could fall, shame on the other side, and some mildly concerning statements about how nothing will keep us together and nothing will drive them away which, all things considered, are pretty easy to breeze past, as most artists who subsequently covered the song as a Bic-in-the-air romantic anthem proceeded to do. (And there have been many, including Dylan’s kid.)

36) That’s it. “‘Heroes’” is too long. That’s the problem that needs solving.

IV) Peter Gabriel

37) It’s a little hard to believe, but for the last twenty-ish years, Peter Gabriel—the original singer of one of the defining bands of progressive rock, a multi-platinum hitmaker of the ’80s and ’90s, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a tireless promoter of musicians from diverse cultures and geographies, a distinguished campaigner for human rights, and an innovator not only in popular music but also in music videos, film scoring, multimedia, and digital content distribution—has largely functioned as a covers act.

38) Gabriel’s most recent album of new original songs, Up, came out way back in 2002. While it was respectfully received, it did not exactly set the world on fire. This is significant because it appeared a full decade after his prior album, Us, which was a big hit—and Us came along six years after the massive success of its predecessor So, one of the defining albums of the 1980s. (As you have surely noticed, with respect to his titles, Gabriel is doing a thing.) It’s hard to deduce much from a graph with three data points, but the trends are not encouraging: Gabriel, who turned 72 on February 13, has been releasing less and less noteworthy material less and less often.

39) Among Gabriel’s many valid reasons for finishing albums so infrequently—my dude runs a record label, a recording studio, and a music festival, he remains active with humanitarian causes and high-tech undertakings, and he seems devoted to his four kids and his spouse—the one cited most often by those who’ve worked with him is his perfectionism, especially regarding his lyrics. (During the recording of So, producer Daniel Lanois famously nailed the studio door shut to trap Gabriel inside until he finished writing.) I suspect that this ongoing struggle with putting words to tunes is one of two main factors that have slowed his musical output to a trickle.

40) But I’m also not sure that perfectionism is the right word. Gabriel can be a good lyricist, even a great lyricist, and sometimes even his bad lyrics—“from nippled skin as smooth as silk the bugles blown as one,” comes to mind—have a slap-in-the-face urgency, a lack of self-censorship that’s almost startling. But Gabriel has always seemed aware that writing is difficult for him, and that determining whether a lyric works even more difficult. I confess I do not see evidence of perfectionism in the lyrics of Up. There’s some extremely killer music, but too often the language is inert, plodding, burdened with metaphors that lag a few steps behind the listener and insights that seem transcribed from notes jotted in a therapist’s parking lot. One reason why Up didn’t sell fantastically well is that it’s darker, harsher, and more demanding than most of Gabriel’s prior work; another reason is that it’s just not very good.

41) During the Up sessions Gabriel briefly had at his disposal the composer Nick Ingman and a symphony orchestra, and he had the smart idea to enlist both in an arrangement and recording of “The Book of Love,” a song by Stephin Merritt from the Magnetic Fields’ breakthrough triple album 69 Love Songs. Gabriel and Ingman basically pulled a Jeff Buckley “Hallelujah” on Merritt’s song, inverting the droll–sweet ratio. Gabriel’s version turned up on the soundtrack to the English-language remake of Shall We Dance? in 2004, and quietly began to establish its use-value in the culture at large. “Peter Gabriel's cover of this song paid for the down payment on my house in LA,” Merritt informed Rolling Stone. I would put the odds of it having been the first dance at your cousin’s wedding at approximately one in seven.

42) The fact that Gabriel recorded “The Book of Love” suggests that he was already considering a voice-and-orchestra album of other people’s songs, but his next notable cover project was very different. In 2008 the head of British indie label XL—whose kids went to school with Gabriel’s sons—approached him with news of a young American band they’d recently signed. “They are mentioning you as an influence,” is how Gabriel summarized the conversation to Q; indeed, the band had given him a shout-out in one of their singles. When XL suggested that it’d be funny and awesome if Gabriel cut his own version of the song that namechecked him, Gabriel enlisted the aid of London synth-poppers Hot Chip and did just that. The young Americans in question were Vampire Weekend; the song was “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”

43) Now, as everyone involved in this undertaking surely understood, the notion that Vampire Weekend had cited Gabriel as “an influence”—or that they had made what Gabriel biographer Daryl Easlea calls a “generous reference” to him in the song—is just a staggering oversimplification. As frontman Ezra Koenig told Rolling Stone, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is “about colonialism and the aesthetic connections between preppy culture and the native cultures of places like Africa and India”; this is all quite clear from the song’s mention of reggaetón as a soundtrack to affluent white leisure, its rhymed reference to Benetton’s use of indigenous people as fashion props, and most of all the music itself, which borrows playfully from Congolese soukous and Kenyan benga.

44) To put a finer point on it, Vampire Weekend is not, or is only incidentally, citing Gabriel as an influence. What they’re really doing is invoking him as a metonym for appropriation, appropriation that may be well-intentioned and high-minded and tasteful but still has the inevitable effect of centering the appropriating artist to that artist’s disproportionate benefit, appropriation of the sort that they also suspect themselves of committing with their own globally-inflected guitar pop. The line “this feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too” is a way of saying they understand that what they’re doing might offend some listeners, and of asking those listeners to give them the benefit of the doubt. It also situates the band, for better or worse, within a tradition.

45) And beyond just showing that he’s a good sport, Gabriel’s cover of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is a way of acknowledging the concerns summed up in the band’s reference. It’s not a refutation, nor an apology, just an acknowledgement that it’s complicated, that his critics’ arguments can’t be dismissed out of hand, and that good intentions are rarely enough.

46) This, I strongly suspect, has been the other major factor stymieing Gabriel’s productivity: when you make your music more slowly—way more slowly—than the culture changes, certain creative practices that were acceptable or even progressive the last time you put out an album may now seem incautious, presumptuous, or clueless. Beginning around his fourth solo album in 1982, contributions by musicians who play in local and/or traditional idioms gradually became a core component of Gabriel’s studio methods; this approach peaked with his score to The Last Temptation of Christ in 1989 and Us in 1992. But by the time Up came out in ’02, thoughtful listeners had grown more aware of the unavoidable imbalances of power between established stars and their more obscure collaborators, and Gabriel had already started dialing back on such guest spots, which by then might have come off as blithe or merely decorative. Put Us on the turntable and you’ll hear bagpipes, Senegalese sabar drums, an Armenian duduk, a Russian choir, and Sinéad O’Connor within the first seven minutes; sonically speaking, apart from a showcase for the late great qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Up collects comparatively few stamps in its passport. This is a big change. It did not result in a better album.

47) I will say this: while not above reproach, I think Gabriel gets unfairly sullied by round-up-the-usual-suspects critiques of colonialist appropriation. For one thing, his interest in world music, and African music in particular, is bound up from the beginning with his commitment to opposing colonialism and promoting human rights. For another, sometimes the instances of appropriation that listeners decry just aren’t there. Gabriel’s 1980 anti-apartheid anthem “Biko,” for instance, is often described as containing “African drums,” but there are no African rhythms in it, and there’s nothing specifically African about a drum: it’s an ancient instrument common to every culture, an ecumenical point that Gabriel emphasizes by incorporating both Celtic bagpipes and lyrics sung in Steven Biko’s native Xhosa, along with vocal percussion that evokes a dedifferentiated prehistory of human mourning. Throughout his post-“Biko” career Gabriel kept his doors open wide, recruiting interesting musicians from all over the place; he did not, for the most part, use their work as a foundation or armature for his own. It’s illuminating to compare his track record with, say, Paul Simon’s behavior during the same era. The distinction matters to me, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

48) In any case, after years of being stalled out on an album of original songs, Gabriel decided to clear the decks by switching to a new project: a collection of covers. (In typical Gabriel fashion he also decided to overcomplicate the project by making it a double album: one LP of Gabriel doing other people’s songs, to be called Scratch My Back, plus a companion LP of all the artists covered on the first LP covering his songs, to be called I’ll Scratch Yours. This predictably turned into a shitshow; I don’t have time to get into it.) Prompted, one imagines, by his uncertainly about the best way to step back from the global rhythms and timbres that had adorned his work for thirty-odd years, Gabriel decided to give himself a restriction: the covers album would utilize no drums and no guitars.

49) And encouraged, one imagines, by the success of “The Book of Love,” Gabriel decided to use an orchestra—or smaller ensembles of orchestral instruments—to accompany his voice on Scratch My Back in lieu of a standard rock band. Back in his public-school days Gabriel sang complex choral works and became a passably adept flautist; for someone so strongly associated with drum circles and buzzy Middle Eastern reeds, he has a solid understanding of European formal music, and he knew that in terms of rhythm and dynamics an orchestra could handle anything he might throw at it—provided he had the right arranger.

50) He had the right arranger. John Metcalfe had been recording his own stuff at Gabriel’s world-class studio—I already linked to it above, but seriously, check it out—and he was the perfect guy for the gig: an accomplished composer in his own right, making music at an interesting remove from classical, ambient, electronic, and postpunk, he’d also already done string arrangements for a bunch of people you’ve heard of. He and Gabriel talked about Scratch My Back, their ideas clicked, and Gabriel gave Metcalfe rough demos of four songs to take a crack at. One of the four was “Heroes.”

In the Interest of Full Disclosure (an Interlude)

I guess I should probably mention that Peter Gabriel is the main reason I care about popular music.
When I started high school, the only vaguely rock ’n’ roll album I owned was Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required; what I listened to seriously was “classical” music, or more accurately orchestral music composed during the top half of the 20th century: Copland, Bartók, Prokofiev, Ravel, stuff like that. Sure, I’d tune into Top-40 radio like normal people, but nothing I heard there came anywhere close—I distinctly remember thinking this—to the unapologetically epic cheeseball awesomeness of, say, the finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.
     Patient friends gradually steered me toward other worthwhile stuff. Rebecca, a girl I was semi-dating whose tastes were way more sophisticated than my own, gently suggested that given my tolerance for Collins I might want to check out So, the most recent album by his erstwhile Genesis bandmate. I did; it was good. It was catchy and dramatic, but also dense and precise: the more you listened, the more you heard.
     Plus it was interesting, at a time when my capacity to be interested in stuff was probably at its peak. Gabriel’s songwriting was good, but his real focus seemed to be on playing with different timbres, different human and instrumental voices—which was one of the main things that I dug about orchestral music, too, when I thought about it. To a greater extent than anything else I’d listened to, So encouraged me to pay attention to who was doing what on a recording, and the large cast of collaborators in its liner notes gave me a bunch of paths to follow, a helpful resource in those pre-internet days when discovering new music required a little legwork.
     It wasn’t my favorite album of all time, but I liked it well enough to pick up Gabriel’s next release, the mostly-instrumental Passion: Music from the Last Temptation of Christ—which might actually be my favorite album of all time—as well as Us when it finally came out. By that point I was all in: anybody with a Gabriel connection was worth checking out. It’s a slight overstatement to say that he was my introduction to Kate Bush, Youssou N’Dour, Laurie Anderson, Nile Rodgers, Paula Cole, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Robbie Robertson, and Joni Mitchell, but the fact that he’d worked with them led me to pay them more and different attention. I started listening to Leonard Cohen and to songs by the Gershwins because Gabriel had covered them. I sought out soundtracks and b-sides and compilations and weird side projects, including OVO, his music for the London Millennium Dome—which honestly wasn’t great, but did hip me to Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile.
     The collaborators Gabriel seemed drawn toward, I noticed, tended to sort into two groups: people like Anderson and Eno and Lanois who were known for establishing signature vibes and engendering atmospheres in which cool things happened, and people who did very specific, immediately recognizable things that nobody else really did. The latter group included bassist and Chapman Stick player Tony Levin, electric violinist Lakshminarayana Shankar, hotshot keyboardists like Larry Fast, Roy Bittan, and David Sancious, idiosyncratic guitarists like David Rhodes, Robert Fripp, and Leo Nocentelli, and distinctive drummers like Manu Katché, Hossam Ramzy, Billy Cobham, and Doudou N'Diaye Rose.
     By taking note of these people when they popped up elsewhere, I began to get a sense of lateral connections that disregarded or complicated the idea of genre, an idea that increasingly seemed to refer to audience demographics rather than the music itself. Levin, for instance, played progressive rock as a member of King Crimson, but also did session work for Carly Simon and Yoko Ono and Nanci Griffith and the Indigo Girls; he was the bassist on “Downtown Train” by Tom Waits. Shankar performed in Carnatic and jazz fusion ensembles, but also turned up on “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins and “Making Flippy Floppy” by Talking Heads and “Rise” by Public Image Ltd.—a hell of a run for any session player, particularly a weird electric violinist.
     I came across a duet that Shankar recorded with “newgrass” fiddler Mark O’Connor, a dude who’d barely have been on my radar otherwise, but who opened me up to a whole gang of virtuosic and unclassifiable performers like Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Tony Rice, Alison Krauss, and Edgar Meyer. Similarly, Laurie Anderson was a point of entry to a wild network of experimentalists and eccentrics: Bill Laswell and Hal Willner and Arto Lindsay, who led me in turn to John Zorn, Bill Frisell, the Golden Palominos, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Suzanne Vega, Los Lobos, Ornette Coleman, etc. etc. Lanois freshened up my assessments of familiar artists like U2 and Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, and also first made me aware of the Neville Brothers, Joe Henry, Chris Whitley, and Emmylou Harris. The two tracks on Passion that feature Billy Cobham sent me down a path toward Miles Davis. I finally took the plunge on Scott Walker’s allegedly unlistenable album Tilt when I found out that David Rhodes was the guitarist on it. I look back on my initial exposure to much of the music in this paragraph as milestones of importance comparable to or greater than, say, graduating from high school.
     My brother Mike—still living at home outside Houston while I’d been away at college—had gotten into Gabriel too, and when Us came out we traded theories and observations. What are the odds, we wondered, that the cryptic title of the one-verse-no-chorus “Fourteen Black Paintings” was a reference to Houston’s own Rothko Chapel, which we knew from trips to the Museum District? If it was, should we spend a day lurking there when Gabriel’s Secret World tour came through town in the summer of 1993, just in case he stopped in?
     We were right about the reference, but we didn’t do the stakeout. We did go see Gabriel and his band at the Summit, then the home court of the Rockets: my first, and for a long time my only, arena show. (The massive building is now Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church.)
     The show was pretty great, striking a nice balance between conceptualist theatrics, non-album deep cuts, and anthemic shout-alongs. The band finished the set, encored with “In Your Eyes,” and encored again with “Biko.” The houselights came up, and they stayed up for a long time. It had gotten late, and it seemed like people were leaving.
     Then Gabriel came out again, alone, and stood at his bank of keyboards. The houselights remained on. He played “Here Comes the Flood,” a song from his first solo album that’s unlike anything else he’s written—stately, perplexing, and apocalyptic—a song that he never seems sure he got right: his approach had changed several times over the years, and has kept changing since. This, I realize, is something else that has always impressed me about Gabriel: his almost self-destructive inability to pretend that something is finished when it’s not.
     Anyway, he sang the song, he thanked the audience, and he left the stage. The house PA system came on, signaling that the show really was over. The PA was playing—I distinctly remember this—the finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.

V) David Bowie and Peter Gabriel

51) They weren’t friends. Near as I can figure there was no bad blood; Bowie just tended to keep to himself. Given how many people each worked with over the years there’s surprisingly little overlap: Eno—whom Gabriel had known since late in his Genesis tenure—Robert Fripp, Nile Rodgers, Lou Reed. In the early days Bowie and Gabriel were probably best characterized as respectful rivals: they played some of the same venues, and they were on the same bill at least once. They were the two most theatrical singers in the UK rock scene, incorporating visual effects, elaborate costumes, and fictional narrative into their performances; Gabriel kept tabs on what Bowie was doing, and always spoke admiringly of it, but when interviewers asked him if he’d drawn inspiration from it, he’d politely point out that they’d arrived at the same place by different routes, that Genesis had technically probably even gotten there first, that if anything Bowie might have drawn inspiration from them, and that anyway their superficially similar projects were actually rather different in concept. Bowie apparently had little to say about Genesis.

52) Gabriel’s analysis was astute. During Genesis shows he’d repeatedly change costumes—sometimes grotesque in their appearance and impractical in their dimensions—in order to portray characters from the band’s songs. Bowie didn’t do characters; he did personae. He’d be Ziggy Stardust all night, onstage and off. Gabriel’s costumes were an invitation to join the fun; Bowie’s costumes were a curtain, a wall.

53) If I knew nothing about either man apart from their names, and I had to guess which of the two was made up, I’d have guessed wrong.

54) They were both white Englishmen of about the same age: Bowie born in ’47, Gabriel in ’50. Both had rocky first marriages, happy second ones, kids from both. From there they diverge. Bowie grew up in southeast London, went to a technical high school, threw and took a lot of punches. Gabriel was raised on a dairy farm in Surrey and attended the same prestigious public school that every man in his family went to; his first wife’s father was Private Secretary to the Queen. Bowie enjoyed booze, cocaine, and cigarettes; Gabriel is known for his abstemiousness, his dislike of surrendering control to substances. Bowie was always cool; Gabriel has always been—I say this with affection—a massive dork.

55) There’s a quote from record executive Paul Conroy in Easlea’s Gabriel biography that struck me as odd: “He had a lot of time for Bowie,” Conroy says of Gabriel, “and the way that Bowie was a chameleon and moved with the times, and he always listened to lots of music.” The quote seemed odd because the question Conroy was answering wasn’t about Bowie; it was about Gabriel’s turn toward world music, which I hadn’t considered Bowie a precedent for at all. Sure, there are some Arabic and Japanese sounds on the Berlin albums—influences that mostly came in by way of Eno, who’d soon pursue more elaborate globalist pastiche with David Byrne and Talking Heads—but these seemed categorically different than what Gabriel did. Bowie’s koto-plinking and modal melodies had the vibe of deliberate orientalist kitsch, at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, whereas Gabriel tried to work with people who actually came out of the forms and traditions that his music referenced. And that approach, come to think of it, was closer to what Bowie had done when he’d hired experienced funk and R&B players for Young Americans, an album that certainly did influence “Sledgehammer”-era Gabriel, along with many other ’70s-vintage white rock stars who turned to Motown and Stax for inspiration at around the same time. But Gabriel’s output couldn’t really be categorized as “plastic world music.” Could it?

56) And then it occurred to me that in a weird way, Gabriel’s decision to work with an orchestra—that grand signifier of European aristocracy—on the Scratch My Back project after decades of transcultural collaboration landed him pretty much where David Bowie found himself circa Station to Station, decades later and from the opposite direction. While Bowie had peered into the debris of high Wagnerian Romanticism and seen only a death trip, Gabriel saw a set of musical customs and practices analogous to those of any culture, one that contained opportunities for rehabilitation and renewal.

 VI) “Heroes”

57) The quotation marks are gone. Like pretty much everybody who covers the song, Gabriel omits them from his title. To be fair, even Bowie and his record labels weren’t consistent about using them.

58) The rhythm section is gone too, as are Alomar’s and Fripp’s iconic riffs, and Eno’s swooshy synth. Some of the arrangements on Scratch My Back use piano, brass, and woodwinds; this one doesn’t. Just strings. And Gabriel’s voice.

59) As is the case with most others’, Gabriel’s cover is based on the single edit, not the six-minute album version. As I have asserted, the problem with the single edit is that it leaves most of the pathos on the cutting-room floor; the challenge that Gabriel and John Metcalfe took on was to restore that pathos.

60) To be more specific, if the key emotional moment in Bowie’s original is the break in his voice on the line “you, you can be mean”—a line that’s cut from the single edit—then Gabriel’s approach is to put that break back in, to sing the whole song inside that break. To remove the metaphorical quotation marks—the “dimension of irony” that Bowie held up as a shield—along with the literal ones. “‘Heroes’” is a song about the failure of love, written by a young man while he was in the midst of it. Here it’s sung by an older man who has known that failure, for whom that failure is still very much present.

61) In Bowie’s original, the arrangement pits the singer against the backing tracks; the song’s drama comes from his increasingly frantic attempts to be heard over the noise. Gabriel and Metcalfe modify this approach, keeping the song centered on the increasingly urgent, increasingly strained vocal, but in their version the accompaniment follows and concurs rather than bulldozing over him, drowning him out.

62) The strings’ apparent emotional sympathy with the vocalist seems like it would diminish the song’s tension; it does the opposite. It leaves the singer exposed and vulnerable for the full duration, and it withholds from the listener any shelter from what’s being expressed. I gather that a fair number of people hate this cover; they find it cringey. It is cringey. That’s the whole point.

63) Any reasonably competent string ensemble can play smoothly enough to allow its audience to forget that the sounds they’re hearing are made by human hands, rubbing horsehair on strings. Metcalfe’s arrangement doesn’t do that. From the first notes we hear—high, wavering, jerkily-bowed—this is music that declares the tactility of its making. The approach is almost exactly, and not accidentally, the opposite of Fripp’s touch-free feedback on the original.

64) Those pained high strings parallel the unsteady creak in Gabriel’s close-mic’ed voice, and they stick by him. Apart from tentative chords from the cellos and basses—starting with pairs of plucked notes, like reassuring pats on the shoulder to let the singer (and us) know they’re there—the sound accrues in a slightly sour cloud.

65) At the second verse the midrange starts to fill in, crowding up as sustained tones separate into quarter notes, then sixteenth notes, increasing in volume. As the orchestra gathers strength Gabriel seems to collapse, shifting Bowie’s break between “you” and “you” onto “queen” instead, turning it into something closer to a sob.

66) And then he jumps. A lot of songs would keep a bass-clef safety net under a singer who goes from zero to sixty like that, high and loud; not this one. The low strings drop out while the violins and violas jump with him: a jagged swarm that goes straight for the brainstem—a fire alarm, a skipping CD, Janet Leigh in the shower at the Bates Motel—and yet also remains freighted with feeling, though it’s hard to name the feeling. Bowie’s “‘Heroes’” shifts between exultation and despair; Metcalfe has conjured a sound that carries both at once. Gabriel just seems to plunge forever through the lacerated air. And then the basses come back in.

67) That’s all I need this song to do. I think it’s awesome.

68) As it happens, this version of “Heroes” also does something else, something I find clever and insightful. The arrangement—built as it is from short phrases that multiply and interweave over a steady pulse, maintaining a wobbly balance between moving forward and sticking in loops, especially during that seething overboil at the top of the third verse—primarily serves the needs of the song, but it also gestures outside. “We had talked about such composers as Arvo Pärt and Steve Reich as inspiration,” Gabriel says of his discussions with Metcalfe about “Heroes”; it’s not hard to hear what Metcalfe borrowed from both. The result sounds very much like a melancholy Pärt piece that gets invaded by a jittery Reich piece starting at about 2:14.

69) With the caveat that nobody really likes to be labelled, both Pärt and Reich belong to a group of composers who emerged in the mid-’60s and came to prominence in the ’70s, a group known as the minimalists. While scoffed at by the serial composers who then dominated the art-music establishment, the minimalists found fans among forward-thinking rock musicians. The opening track of the Who’s 1971 LP Who’s Next, for example—which kicks off with a burbling electric organ ostinato—is named partly in tribute to Terry Riley, whose In C was one of the first minimalist pieces to become widely available in record shops.

70) Prominent among those forward-thinking rockers were, of course, David Bowie and Brian Eno. Although they didn’t know each other at the time, both attended a London performance of Music with Changing Parts by the Philip Glass Ensemble around ’71; later, one of the things that most interested them about the new music coming from Germany was the way those groups adapted minimalist processes. (This was particularly true of Berlin-based Tangerine Dream, among the only German musicians Bowie got to know while he lived there.) These influences permeated Bowie’s Berlin albums, especially evident on “Weeping Wall” from Low, but audible throughout. And the autobahn of influence ran in both directions: Philip Glass later composed his first symphony around elements taken from Low, and his fourth symphony around elements taken from “Heroes”. I think you can hear all this history in Gabriel’s cover if you listen hard enough.

71) It made sense that rock musicians would be inspired by minimalism, because minimalism had itself emerged from interstices between academic composition, conceptual art, jazz, and rock. In those less hidebound forms, the minimalists found an immediacy that academic composition lacked, and areas for exploration that they felt the serialists were neglecting. The composer Ingram Marshall has argued (as cited by scholar Edward Strickland) that despite all their differences, minimalists and serialists both began by rejecting the Romanticism that had served so readily as walk-on music for genocidal fascists: a similar spectrum of concerns, I think, produced the Thin White Duke. The serialist solution was to impose rules that would restrain perfervid expressionism in the concert hall; the minimalists thought the concert hall itself might be the damn problem.

72) This exploratory impulse led the minimalists to investigate musical forms external to the European tradition: Hindustani raga, Japanese gagaku, West African music, Balinese gamelan, etc. Reich studied gamelan closely: music played by large ensembles of closely-tuned metallophones producing dense, dramatic bursts of sound that are traditionally likened to the flaring of a match or the opening of a flower.

73) But while minimalist compositions may be shaped by musical idioms from around the world, they don’t typically sound much like them—mostly because they don’t use the same instrumentation, and don’t try to replicate the original cultural context. They engage with the music as a form, not as a signifier of something; they try to use it as a means of seeing their own received traditions from the outside. When musicians from what I’ll conveniently if problematically call the West venture afar in search of inspiration, there’s always the danger that they’ll just use whatever they find to ornament their established musical practices, without reexamining the assumptions and values those practices are premised on. Minimalism, at its best, was an attempt to not do that.

74) Music in the West has tended to be arranged sequentially: verses lead to choruses, chords follow chords, melodies unspool over a predetermined number of measures. If you step outside the very specific socio-cultural circumstances in which these practices arose—professional ensembles performing written-out compositions of set duration for affluent audiences in various institutional venues—then it starts to seem like a weird way to think about music. In most of the world outside the symphony center, music happens in layers, not sequences: patterns that stack up and shuffle, dance and clash. Viewed in this light, whether from the perspective of an orchestral composer or a rock star, “world music” is maybe best understood as an opportunity not to expand one’s palette, but to return to first things—not to see what else one can do, but to think about what one might stop doing, or at least do more mindfully. 

75) And when Peter Gabriel’s weathered voice stretches for a high note in David Bowie’s song across thirty-two years and amid a latticework of bowed strings—a latticework that emerges like the flaring of a match or the opening of a flower, that opens from nothing, as it has opened before for any number of others—I hear him reaching backward and reaching sideways, feeling out paths. Paying tribute, offering thanks. Taking stock. Trying to figure out how to be good, how to move ahead.

Martin Seay’s debut novel The Mirror Thief was published by Melville House in 2016. Originally from Texas, he lives in Chicago with his spouse, the writer Kathleen Rooney.