Six Degrees of Selling England By The Pound
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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"Can you tell me where my country lies?" sings Peter Gabriel to open Genesis' fourth album. And it is here where the band firmly planted its flag to stake out its own rich territory. In the early '70s prog explosion, Genesis often seemed on the B team, not quite in the ranks of Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull and King Crimson, at least in the U.S. market. Maybe their approach was just too, well, English. But in that regard, this is where Genesis made its first move from the embrace of only those who read Melody Maker and shopped at record import shops into the world of American FM radio and, ultimately, beyond albeit that latter part without Peter Gabriel in the fold. Remarkably, they did it without really mainstreaming the music or diluting the eccentricities, but rather by refining and, crucially, maturing them. Where bombast and flash ruled in prog, Genesis here showed that they could be delicate (the shimmering intro guitarist Steve Hackett and keyboardist Tony Banks give to tour-de-force "The Cinema Show") and atmospheric. Not that England is without power not by any means. The opening "Dancing With the Moonlit Knight" crests with pulsating energy, Phil Collins (who was at the time moonlighting with jazz-rock ensemble Brand X) showing off his oft-overlooked chops. And in the extended instrumental passages Banks and Hackett play with taste and purpose rather than flash even the former's solo piano prelude of "Firth of Fifth" is marked by a restrained touch rather than Emersonian showiness, while the latter's sustained-notes passages are Robert Fripp without the cold math. And throughout, Gabriel paints surreal idylls and eschews the cosmic pronouncements of the band's peers. "I Know What I Like" may well be the epitome of at least this wing of the prog aesthetic, matching the truly weird with the truly catchy. Genesis may never have crafted a better hook even in the Phil Collins years than this song's sing-along "I know what I like and I like what I know, getting better in your wardrobe." And Gabriel may never have uttered a more concise and effective Dada oddity than his "Me, I'm just a lawnmower, you can tell me by the way I walk" aside. Of course, we can't overlook the glimpse at the future, with Collins taking lead vocals on the subdued, compact "More Fool Me." Together it's a surreal combination that, arguably, is the peak of the Genesis catalog, and one of the understated-yet-dazzling gems of the whole prog era at once accessible and uncompromising.
The Eccentric
The Off Beat
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It's no coincidence that Peter Gabriel and David Byrne by the early '80s had both turned into leaders of the global sounds explorations. These were clearly kindred spirits both in terms of sonic sensibilities and arty wanderlust back in their respective '70s emergences, even with the distinctively English/American divide of their quirks. And this is where the possibilities were first fully realized, with an inventive collection that found the common ground between James Brown funk via Fela Kuti's Afrobeat and Steve Reich's shifting-sands pattern music. It's at turns shimmering and rubbery, and often both. Brian Eno is the formal connection here. He'd played a key role in shaping the sound of Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway before stepping in to help squire Talking Heads' rise from New York art-school nerds to full-scale sonic theorists. And it's with this album that the relationship came to full fruition, Eno serving as full collaborator on an album that not so much redefined what a pop-rock band could do as ignore the very concept of definition. Conventional song structure is tossed out the window. Pieces don't so much start and begin as enter and exit or appear and disappear. Opening statement "Born Under Punches" gives Byrne's paranoiac cut-up imagery and chopped delivery a percolating bed, showing off the an expanded with Eno and Adrian Belew weaving extra guitar rhythms inside those of Byrne and Jerry Harrison, while the domestic duo rhythm machine of drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth kept an insistently slippery beat roiling. And then there are Eno's video-game blips and Byrne's echoing vocal bleets to round it out. The claustrophobic "Crosseyed and Painless" (adding more percussionists and ex-LaBelle vocalist Nona Hendryx) and supercharged "The Great Curve" shift between tribal dances and panicked stampede. And of course "Once in a Lifetime" one of the odder slices to ever make the Top 40 is a sound painting of light on water, an earworm that doesn't just stick in your brain but pretty much rewires it. "Houses in Motion," "Seen And Not Seen" and "Listening Wind" keep scrambling the circuits until the closer, "The Overload," well, overloads them with a near-amorphous hypnotic drift. It's at once scintillating, seductive and disorienting. "How did I get here?" It doesn't really matter. We got there and never wanted to leave.
The American Cousins
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Okay, so sure the DMB has been lumped in with the jam-band crowd so routinely that the assumption of a Grateful Dead allegiance is a (misguided) truism. And the chops-heavy jazzy swirl of the band's interplay rightfully slots nicely alongside Sting's first few post-Police endeavors. And there's a reasonable connection often made between the band's "New South" folk-rock spirit and R.E.M. But stay with us here. Everyday, the ensemble's controversial fourth studio album makes a case that the core influence for Mr. Matthews and crew may well have been Peter Gabriel and not just his global-rhythm solo ventures, but reaching all the way back to prime Genesis. "The Space Between" and "Sleep to Dream Her" in particular distill the Gabriel/Genesis tone into a concentrate of weaving melodies, elastic narrative and a mix of subdued pastoralisms and yearning. Just add water (and some Tony Banks synthesizer lines) and you might have something comparable to "The Cinema Show." It's not hard at all to picture young Dave during childhood stays in England and his native Johannesburg absorbing a lot of those source sounds. And that's where the controversy comes in. A whole set of sessions featuring some broodingly personal material cut with the band's regular producer Steve Lillywhite were scrapped. Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette, Aerosmith, Michael Jackson) stepped in not just to give some pop polish to the sound, but to co-write with Matthews and take on the role as an ad hoc DMB member on keyboards. There was outrage among fans. There was uproar. There was heated chatter. There were leaks of the Lillywhite sessions on the Internet. Of course, there was also no lack of sales for Everyday, a huge hit for the band. But there was also a year later another album, the cheekily titled but darker-toned Busted Stuff, built around some of the abandoned songs and a few new ones, including the affecting "You Never Know." Arguably, this song takes the Genesis vibe even further, the somber ballad reaching back to a perhaps unsettled past and looking to an uncertain future. What is certain is that while Genesis and their prog peers were outcasts even among rock outcasts, the seeds sent tendrils out, blossoming in unlikely places.
