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I am officially joining the Peter Gabriel fan club. 

It started last year when I came across Mercy Street and In Your Eyes. Then, a couple weeks ago, one of the needle drops in Marty Supreme played I Have The Touch and I was pleasantly surprised to know it was Peter Gabriel. So, last weekend, when I found his third solo album—nicknamed Melt (1980)— in a CD store in Brooklyn, I was eager to take it home. What a crazy listening experience. I mean, the first song alone, Intruder, knocked me on my ass. Who begins their album with a song about a stalker conducting a home invasion? But for an album designed to test the tensions between individual, society, and state, I suppose it was appropriate.

Among many other accolades, Melt is widely acknowledged as the first album to utilize gated reverb, which creates an explosive and crunchy instrument sound that then gets cut off in order to create a clean, powerful audio. This became one of the definitive sounds of the 80’s and is still used in modern mixing. The most famous example, perhaps, is the drum solo in Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight, which came out one year after Melt and clearly showcases the addictive quality of gated reverb on a percussive instrument. However, Collins wasn’t plagiarizing—Gabriel was the lead singer of Genesis before Collins and it’s actually Collins playing the drums on Melt. 

And Through The Wire

Of all the songs on the album, it was the sixth track, And Through The Wire, that arrested me most. Despite a phosphorescent guitar performance from Paul Weller, this track is one of the least popular on the album, often overshadowed by the political punches Gabriel makes on other songs. Yet, as far as I’m concerned, the song is a masterpiece. It gives perfect voice to the primal desire of a man in a long-distance relationship, while simultaneously elucidating the effects that communicating ”through the wire” has had on society. The result is a sonic exploration of sound, sensuality, and media-related intimacy.

Intro

The song begins in anticipation, with three notes played repeatedly in succession over a hovering and humming synth. With little warning, the chorus explodes with all the urgency of electricity being switched to the “ON” position:

And through the wire I hear your voice

And through the wire I touch the power

And through the wire I see your face

It’s through the wire…

It’s only appropriate that the start of the song begin abruptly—that’s how the wire works. Although the wire is primarily an extension of our ears and voice across distances, it is also a medium that requires people to reorganize their sense perceptions. The modern world is largely a visual culture, where seeing, reading, and interpreting symbols are our modus operandi. The wire, however, transports us to the land of the blind—an auditory world where there are no visuals and where sound is paramount. Marshall Mcluhan deliberated on these differences endlessly throughout his career and once remarked that “to a blind man, everything is sudden.” His point was that a visual culture creates hierarchies, gradients, and spaces that don’t exist in an auditory world. An ear-first culture is always smack-dab in the middle of commotion and activity comes at them from every angle.

First Verse

Furthermore, Mcluhan considered the telephone a cool medium because it demands complete participation from the user. It is not a medium that allows for passivity, but commands the entirety of the person on the other side to answer, lean in, and respond. This is why there is something peculiarly anxiety-inducing about a phone going unanswered in a public space and why a phone that rings out in silence is a sure-fire way to create suspense in a movie or play. We see this activation of the singer’s involvement in the first verse, which acknowledges the inherent sensuality of a telephone call but also records the awakening of atavistic instincts within the singer:

Friday night, you’re staying at home

I want you

I’m ticking and clicking, a metronome

I want you

Prowling the waterhole, I wait for the kill

I want you

On a craft level, I so enjoy the occasional click of a metronome that appears after this line on the second verse, bridge, and outro, but then disappears each chorus. When I listen on my iPod (as opposed to the Youtube version), each click alternates between my left and right headphone, which is a small but fun detail that adds flavor to the production. The amorous and hungry way which Gabriel growls “I want you” is so cathartic, keeping the repetitive line from going stale.

Second Verse & Chorus Change

The second verse brings in some of Gabriel’s trademark ambiguity and the listener is tipped off that something else is taking place beneath the surface for these lovers:

Watchmaker steady his delicate hands

I want you

For barbecue parties on blood red sands

I want you

Caught in the struggle, tight on the rod

I want you

Bring out the devil, bring out the God

This is where Gabriel first begins to play with the definition of “the wire.” Where it originally stood as a straightforward metaphor for a telephone, Gabriel begins to introduce ideas of conflict (caught in the struggle), violence (blood red sands), and morality (devil/god). In this atmosphere of danger, the wire is now put “tight on the rod,” conjuring images of fences that create barriers for protection, but that also maintain the status quo, or the distance, between lovers.

Although never entirely removing himself from the metaphor of a remote romance, Gabriel is speaking to the broader ramifications of the fences we erect; how they breed safety, but also mistrust. This is underlined by the chorus, which now has updated lyrics with a double entendre:

And through the wire you are secure

And through the wire we can talk

And through the wire we can walk

It’s through the wire

Although sung with the same fervor as the first chorus, this situation can read simultaneously as a celebration or a concession. “Security” is great, but the line between fortress and prison is deceptively thin. It’s no longer clear whether or not the wire is preserving or preventing intimacy between the couple.

Bridge

By the time Gabriel hits the bridge, it’s clear that the singer has sunk into a state of discombobulation and is fighting ghosts of paranoia. The seed of mistrust planted in the previous verse is now taking root:

Driving around the city rings

Staring at the shape of things

I talk in pictures, not in words

Overloaded with everything we said

Be careful where you tread

Watch the wire

When off the phone, the singer travels aimlessly in circles and the world is reduced to vague outlines. He is constantly overthinking conversations, what was said, and what his lover meant by her words. The unnatural state of long-distance romance is eating at him, and the phrase “watch the wire” is reminiscent of a tripwire that may cause the relationship to implode if either of them take a wrong step.

The notion that he speaks “in pictures, not in words” is another effect of the auditory world. In The Seducer’s Diary, Soren Kierkegaard uses the character of The Seducer to explain that the medium of sound is the medium most ripe for manipulation. He notes that when a person goes into a confessional, for example, they unconsciously form an image of the person on the other side of the partition, and that image becomes an unquestioned assumption to the listener. Perhaps the best example of this phenomena is seen in The Conversation, an excellent film featuring the late Gene Hackman released just a few years prior to Melt. In The Conversation, Gene Hackman is an audio surveillance expert who, through the use of wiretaps and listening technology, becomes convinced that a murder took place in a room next door. When he finds no physical evidence of the murder, he begins to question both his profession and his sanity, eventually losing touch with reality altogether. 

In this sense, we can pull on yet another Mcluhanism: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is… a hallucinating idiot.”

Final Chorus and Outro

Indeed, The Conversation helps unlock the final entendre of And Through The Wire; a commentary on the blurring between safety and surveillance, affection and obsession, connection and control. This applies equally to the lovers as well as to society and the state, which has graduated from erecting fences to more sophisticated forms of dominance. Now that the wire provides near-constant access to the world and has effectively eliminated privacy, the relationship between all of the above turns the chorus into:

And through the wire we’re clinging like leeches

And through the wire we push out tailor-made speeches

For lovers, these lyrics represent the way that their relationship has turned into dysfunction; clinging to each other for any semblance of love and attention, but also knowing deep down that they are simply going through the motions, rehearsing lines and heartless platitudes to each other. The acceleration towards performance and speciousness has already begun.

For society and state, these lines are a judgment against the parasitic practice of governments spying on their civilians, which also in-authenticates communication and puts a chill on genuine expression. The government listens and pretends to prioritize the people, the people pretend to speak as if they don’t know they are being listened to. Thus goes the death of privacy.

If that interpretation sounds dubious to you, then the outro should convince you:

And through the wire

We get so strange across the border

We get so strange across the border

We get so strange across the border (Border!)

We get so strange across the border

We get so strange

Through the lens of the lovers, this ending has multiple possible meanings. First is the simple acknowledgment that things have gotten weird for this long distance relationship. Secondly, the singer may be implying that the couple avoids their issues by getting freaky—or “strange“—via phone sex. You’ll remember that Kendrick Lamar uses a similar ending to his domestic dispute in We Cry Together.

In the context of society and state, the outro is a clear indictment that governments are not just using the wire to tap into their own civilians’ private life, but also leveraging modern technology to spy on other countries and cause global conflict. This geopolitical slant creates a natural segue into the next song on the album, Games Without Frontiers, which handles the topic of war and politics. The undeniably lusty and breathy tones with which Gabriel sings the final lines make me favor the phone-sex interpretation, but they also address the paradoxical way he saw people coping with this toxic relationship to the state, welcoming this twisted dynamic rather than rejecting it.

Conclusion

In the end, the artistry of this song is impossible to exhaust—and it would be a crime to not have explored a little of it. Peter Gabriel puts on a masterclass throughout the album and each track is no doubt multi-layered similarly to this one. I highly recommend you listen as soon as you can with a good speaker or headset. Viva la Revolución!

About the Author:

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that you are guaranteed to love.