This Week's Forgotten Gem of the '80s - Peter Gabriel's "I Don't Remember"
Thursday April 17, 2008
Peter Gabriel's solo career has always been quite a mixed bag for me, shining at times with wit and elegance but enjoying undeserved radio saturation at others. I can't tell you how many times I've suffered through "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time" throughout my lifetime, either during the peak mid-'80s period of Gabriel's smash album So or more recently at a retail establishment on the sound system. Clearly, the sheer familiarity of tunes like these has a tendency to breed hostility among some listeners, but thankfully I have more positive things to say about "I Don't Remember", the amnesia-themed track featured on Gabriel's third solo effort, from 1980.For one thing, this song rocks harder than Gabriel had done before or has probably done since. For another, the cryptic lyrical portrait of a shadowy character with memory problems accurately predicted shenanigans to come from Ronald Reagan's White House: "I don't remember, I don't recall, I've got no memory of anything at all." Who knew it could be almost as effective as a campaign slogan as it is a well-crafted chorus for a rock song? As a vocalist, Gabriel makes his greatest contributions when he barks cerebral lyrics in an aggressive style against the backdrop of nifty pop hooks, and he takes advantage of a golden opportunity to do just that with this (ironically) memorable song.
Album Cover Photo Courtesy of Geffen Records
Comments
Steve, you seem to be coming up with all my favourite artistes from the 80s these days: Talking Heads, XTC, and now Peter Gabriel.
Gabriel is one artiste who makes some of the most innovative video clips that you can never get tired of watching. There is mystery, there is magic, there is mayhem and there are murderous intentions going on in the clip of “I Don’t Remember”, which has to be one of Gabriel’s most powerful songs if not the most powerful.
Your creative-writing ingenuity amazes me at times. I am referring to: “As a vocalist, Gabriel makes his greatest contributions when he barks cerebral lyrics in an aggressive style against the backdrop of nifty pop hooks.” These lines can stand word for word for “Shock the Monkey”, another stupendous song which has a most innovative video.
Here I must admit that “Shock the Monkey” was the first song of Gabriel that I had ever heard. I clearly recall that it was in heavy rotation on MTV during the summer of 1983. I immediately became a Gabriel fan. I got to hear “Biko” and “I Don’t Remember” much later.
There is so much irony in the lyrics of “Shock the Monkey”:
Darling, don’t you monkey with the monkey
Monkey, monkey, monkey
Don’t you know you are going to shock the monkey.
The lyrics of “Biko” too are full of irony. The truth resonates in the most chilling of ways:
You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher.
One more thing: In the clip of “I Don’t Remember” the juxtaposition of ‘NOW’ and ‘HERE’ into ‘Nowhere’ is simply brilliant. One moment you are living and now and here, the next moment when a poisonous dart hits you, you might be nowhere at all!