Peter Gabriel’s First US Top 40 Hit Stayed True to His Uncompromising Self

For a good chunk of the 80s, Peter Gabriel’s old band, Genesis, crossed over to the pop charts with stunning regularity. Gabriel himself mostly stayed on the outskirts of that scene due to his music’s artier, weirder tendencies.

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He’d eventually make the jump to crossover superstar himself. Before that, he managed to get over the hump in the US with a Top 40 hit that proved both commercial and willfully strange.

Peter’s Path

Peter Gabriel decided that he needed to move on from Genesis, the band that he spearheaded throughout the first half of the 70s, in 1975. At the time, Gabriel made it sound like he might be done with music for good. And he did indeed stay quiet for a few years.

When he returned in 1977, his debut single sounded as accessible and pop-oriented as anything he had ever released with Genesis. “Solsbury Hill”, which partially described his desire to go out on his own, shot to the UK Top 20. Perhaps because Genesis hadn’t ever made big inroads in the US, meaning Gabriel’s own profile in America was low, the song only made it to No. 68 stateside.

Gabriel indulged his more avant-garde musical tendencies throughout his first three albums, all of which he titled Peter Gabriel. He once again scored big in Great Britain in 1980 with the exotic single “Games Without Frontiers”. But that song also fell just short of the American Top 40.

When Gabriel returned in 1982 with another LP (which he again self-titled, although his American label called it Security), the songs were more inward-looking and less bombastic. But that didn’t apply to the song that his labels chose for the first single. That would be a creation titled “Shock The Monkey”.

“Monkey” Business

Gabriel worried about “Shock The Monkey” as the first single, since its uptempo, danceable style differed from much of the record. But it did share with its album-mates a reliance on synthesizer textures. Those were accentuated with the help of Gabriel’s ace session players like Tony Levin, playing the bass-like Chapman Stick, drummer Jerry Marotta, and guitarist David Rhodes.

Lyrically, the song practically insisted that you take it literally. Gabriel chanted the title phrase again and again, and later launched into a falsetto so high it sounded practically simian. A bizarre yet compelling video only enhanced the view that the song referenced something sinister.

Many years later, Gabriel explained that the lyrics acted as an overarching metaphor for the deleterious effects that jealousy can have on a person. Maybe most fans missed that right off the bat. But it didn’t stop them from enjoying “Shock The Monkey”, which made it to No. 29 on the US charts.

State of “Shock”

As catchy as it was, “Shock The Monkey” still sounded alien compared to everything around it on rock radio. That’s because Gabriel wasn’t necessarily looking to deliver a hit single. He instead was doing things in his typically uncompromising way. Note how cymbals, a Gabriel pet peeve for many years, are nowhere to be found on the track.

Four years down the road, with the encouragement of producer Daniel Lanois, Gabriel started to focus a bit more on words and music first and atmosphere second. That led to the album So, which featured several hit singles. But “Shock The Monkey”, in all its glorious otherness, got there first.

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