purchase [red rain]
I am pretty sure that I memorized the entirety of <Selling England ByThe Pound>. Probably couldn’t sing along today on the first try - but it
would come back quickly, I knew it that well. As years went by, it was Phil
Collins whose name cropped up more frequently (one of the early MTV hits was
his "You Can’t Hurry Love") - while Peter Gabriel was more or less
dismissed. Worse: Gabriel was denigrated as being not quite of right mind ...
maybe kind of crazy?
Like many other "combos", Genesis was good because of the
cross-fit of its' leads styles: Collins tends to the middle, Gabriel to the
edges. But which of the two is more creative? For that matter: What defines
creativity? Producing more? Being more artistic? Sorry: I mean
"artistic"?
That said, while Collins remained in the spotlight, Gabriel faded. Well ...
not entirely. He, too made an early MTV appearance with Sledgehammer: a whopper
of a production. It must have pushed the limits of video editing to the edges
for its time (The Wikipedia says it earned the most awards any clip has ever
attained. Rightly so. IMHO way surpassing another MTV clip of about the same
time: I Want My MTV/Money for Nothing). Virtually every frame (25 per second) of Sledgehammer is
a separate shot. Talk about attention to detail! And it that attention to
detail that may have marked Gabriel as not quite "right".
But, as much as I love both the Sledgehammer video and the song itself, it
is only tangentially related to the current SMM theme of <pour>. What we
need is a song that relates to pour, and Sledgehammer's closest reference is to
"blue sky".
To the rescue, as I attempt to focus on Gabriel: <Red Rain>. Lots of
pouring here. Again and again: we've got ... "pouring down all over
me". But this isn’t a case of trying to make the foot fit the shoe ....
it's a darned good song that you should really take a listen to the clip at the top.
