Peter Gabriel - Washing of the Water

(foreword: i wrote this last night while having a serious stomachache and i’m always writing sensitive shit like this when i’m sick and grumpy. anyway, i need to get more actual writing stuff out there so i’m posting this anyway before i put it off for so long i forget about it)

Is Peter Gabriel cool? I don’t know if Peter Gabriel is cool or not. I don’t care, really. I don’t like Phil Collins much but Peter Gabriel, to me, is like Phil Collins minus the cloying and utter mediocrity. If this whole thing makes me less cool, I don’t care. Peter Gabriel has helped me through some of the toughest times in my life and I think it’s time I write about his music. (I try not to write about music, usually, but i’m just a nervous wreck right now and need something to talk about. Maybe Peter Gabriel isn’t your bag, whatever. that’s fine.)

-Gloomy Peter Gabriel songs are the best Peter Gabriel songs. I can take or leave his poppy output like Sledgehammer or Burn You Up, Burn you Down (though Solsbury Hill is great); his real talent shines through when the subject matter gets somber. Probably the best aspects of his sad songs are the overtones of Helplessness against real-world strife - Here Comes the Flood and Wallflower, for example, are about issues that go beyond trite, first-world love songs. Gabriel’s many travels and experience in World music informs a far more grown-up viewpoint than his peers.

-So many of Peter Gabriel’s best songs aren’t about romance, they’re about trust, loyalty, and a kind of familial love. “In Your Eyes”, obviously his best-known track and arguably his most straightforward love song, isn’t about love based on desire, it’s about supportive love, the kind shared between spouses. It comes from a more emotionally mature place than other love songs. It’s not just about loving and adoring each other, it’s lifting each other up in a world that couldn’t give a damn. And that’s the conceit behind Don’t Give Up, too. It’s the kind of love that you have for your family members, for your closest friends, and if you’re lucky enough, with someone who will love you for the rest of your life.

-Another aspect of Peter Gabriel’s best songs is when that love is in jeopardy, or when it isn’t as fervent when the real world comes barging down your door. It’s raw uncertainty - it’s uncertainty about what the next day society will bring you, like in Blood of Eden, or uncertainty about whether you’ll ever mend your relationship like in Red Rain.

-But let me just talk about Washing of the Water for a second. “So Deep, So Wide / Would you take me on your back for a ride?” Despite the existence of “Don’t Give Up”, so many of Peter Gabriel’s songs are about the desire to do just that - to throw your arms in the air and say “I’m done. i can’t take this.” To be so confounded by the problems you’re faced with that all you want is to let something bigger than yourself take over, or to have a fresh start, a clear mind. And that’s the thing that make Peter Gabriel’s songs so touching to me. They come from this completely earnest place deep down - not just to be loved, but to be relieved of strife. It’s from such a completely simple place in the mind that his songs just feel elemental. Even though the emotions are seated in our most childish id, they’re articulated in such a weary, old-hearted tone it breaks your heart.

It all boils into the last line of the song: After verses and verses of poetic imagery about rivers and hardship, Gabriel wraps it up with a simple plea:

“In the washing of the water, will you take it all away/Bring me something to take this pain away.”

-That’s all it’s about. Take this pain away. That’s all anyone wants. It’s not whiny, it’s not immature. It’s a cry from the depths of your soul that will probably never get answered.