In the late 70s there was a band named Genesis. Their frontman was a guy named Peter Gabriel. Eventually Gabriel quit to pursue a solo career and they promoted their drummer, Phil Collins, to frontman. Then Phil Collins started releasing solo albums. Phil Collins went on to be one of the most commercially and artistically significant artists of the 80s. I think most people even today, if you play them "In the Air Tonight" or "I Don't Care Anymore", will immediately identify there's something electric and indelible about those songs. The "80s Aesthetic" ("vaporwave") may or may not have ever captured a real thing, but I've heard it theorized the true apotheosis of the 80s Feeling was the start of episode 8 of Miami Vice, which was a slow long wordless scene in which a car glides through a neon Miami at night while "In The Air Tonight" plays in its entirety. That's what Phil Collins did for us.
After Genesis, Peter Gabriel went on to make an absolutely incredible amount of money.
What is Peter Gabriel's most long-lasting contribution to our culture? I'd argue it's the music video for Sledgehammer, which basically defined the early music video by itself.
This single was huge. This album was huge. This video was huge. This video was on such heavy rotation on MTV that everyone got sick of it, to the point where Gabriel at one point wrote MTV a letter asking them to tone it down before their viewers started hating him. What everything I'm saying here comes down to was that it was very popular. I'm not saying it's good. Is it good? Well… hm. I don't actually like this song. The music video is definitely remarkable— visually inventive and engaging at every moment, complements the music, top of the line craft. What is it saying? What's the message? I don't know. Possibly nothing¹. That's okay. It's fun. Sometimes it's okay for art to just be art. There's that brief moment that the background visuals explode into a Pollock painting for maybe half a second. That's really good, it's making a statement about art, it's drawing a line from visually inventive visual forms of the midcentury to this new, dynamic visual medium (the music video) which Sledgehammer is by itself demonstrating the maturity and potential of. What's a Pollock painting communicate? Do we expect a given Pollock painting to say something about the world outside itself? I'd say no. I'd say if we let off Pollock with a "well! … that sure is something!" but expect "Sledgehammer" to expand our horizons before we recognize its legitimacy that's just artistic chauvinism. Or worse, cowardice. Maybe we'd be afraid to badmouth Jackson Pollock lest we look uncultured but we feel freer to belittle an overplayed, cheesy music video. Screw that. The video for "Sledgehammer" is art.
Let's return to the music video at the top of this thread, "Steam".
This video sucks ass.
I've never really sat down and listened to Peter Gabriel, or Phil Collins, or Genesis. The only reason I've ever seen the "Steam" video, or heard of this song at all, is it was on a collection of early CG animation I watched once, which I could have sworn was in the "Mind's Eye" series but now double checking on Google I realize was "Computer Animation Festival, Volume 2.0" (released 1994, 58 minutes, VHS originally retained for $19.99)².
It's worth looking at the timing here. "So" and "Sledgehammer" were released in 1986, the height of Gabriel's popularity. "Us" and "Steam" were released in 1992. In 1992 Gabriel is no longer culturally hot and music has changed a lot in six years. Gabriel's use of synthesizers, drum machines and very mild nods to funk are not as distinctive as they once were, culture has caught up. White people have heard of hip-hop now. Decontextualized, photocopied hip-hop aesthetics are a basic element of children's cartoons now. Peter Gabriel is no longer as cool as Yogi Bear.
The video for "Steam" has the same director as "Sledgehammer" (Stephen R. Johnson³) and is very clearly an attempt to recapture Sledgehammer's magic using CGI (not a lot of CGI, and not good CGI). Nothing is recaptured. Johnson's 80s videos show an easy mastery of the film medium which he simply doesn't have with 3D animation. Much early CG has a kind of charming experimental nature to it as artists get drunk on the possibilities of the new medium and try to do everything at once. "Steam" fails even to capture this; it is Trying Too Hard and not succeeding. Maybe some of these visuals would have looked impressive for about ten seconds in 1992. By 1994, they would have already looked dated. The video is honestly probably worth watching as a document of what happens if you try to use every feature in a 1992 video editing package, but it's legitimately kind of hard to watch all the way to the end as the visuals get cringier and, inexplicably, hornier (without ever actually being hot).
But never mind the 3D animation. The real problem here is the video isn't doing anything. The Steam video is a set of disconnected ideas; there's no throughline like there is in "Sledgehammer". There's the "city" segment which is the only one that, despite its odd elements (check out grandpa dancing in the background here), kind of works, and then there's the (augh!) Adam and Eve segment, the… stripper segment?, the sauna segment with Gabriel making a face that resonates in my nightmares and then nothing in the final two minutes makes any impression at all. Nothing calls back, except the Adam and Eve segment, but that's the most awkward one and it feels more awkward every time it calls back. There is actually a clumsily overt callback to Sledgehammer (Sledgehammer visually begins with cells and ends with the milky way, Steam does the reverse), but who cares? You're just making me think about a better piece of art.
In short the "Steam" video is just a series of Cool Music Video Ideas shoved together until it fits the song's bloated five-minute runtime (they edited down from six minutes and it's still five minutes long). You can produce an enjoyable music video from shoving together Cool Music Video Ideas but you have to sell it. You need an energy and confidence this video does not have. A moment ago I argued "Sledgehammer" should be considered true art despite lacking Ideas other than visual ones, that it's okay for art to simply be impressive or fun. But to do that you have to cast a magic spell, you have to actually be fun, or impressive, or evocative or something. This doesn't even have visual ideas, not ones that land. This isn't anything.
So that's out of the way. Let's talk about the song. I watched the Steam video once years ago, promptly forgot 70% of it, and didn't really think about it again except for that one really memorable "THIS! HEEEAT!" single-use hook near the start. The hook eventually drew me back to pull the song up on Tidal and give it a listen. And then I pulled it up again. And again. And again. And almost every day last week.
I think I have slightly fallen in love with this song.
To get something out of this song you kind of need to listen to a high-quality version. Tidal or Spotify I guess. You can buy the track on Bandcamp (Peter Gabriel is on Bandcamp, go figure) but even the free stream feels kind of overcompressed compared to the bright-feeling mix I've got in my Tidal tab. This is actually important. The production is what sells it.
"Steam" is a kind of a doofy song. The Wikipedia entry cites an interview in which Gabriel claims "the song is about a relationship in which the woman is sophisticated, bright, cultured, and knows everything about anything while the man knows nothing about anything; however, he does know about the woman, and she does not know much about herself". Uh. Well, the two middle verses, sure, I guess I can kind of see that, the rest no. Like the video, the lyrics for Steam feel like unrelated parts welded together. There's one idea in the first verse, there's one idea in the middle verses, there's a third idea in the "cool sounding" chorus and then it basically ends with Gabriel exhorting the audience to dance. Whatever, that's all fine, this is a pop song.
It's small, but I think the thing that transitioned this from a bad song I was listening to a lot to a song I like is a drum fill. One specific drum fill, the single bar that plays as Gabriel says "how you feel could make it real" in the choruses. Not the first chorus though. If you listen carefully on the first chorus repetition "how you feel could make it real" gets a unique drum bar, and the "thump-a-THUMP-a-thump-a-THUMP-a" that would normally play there is instead delayed to "with the dreamer's dream". What's interesting to me about this is how restrained it is. In a maximalist, highly produced song, with a music video which is actively ruined by its desperation to snowjob you with technology⁴, someone working on this song produced an absolutely killer drum hook and they decided to mix it subtly. Most listeners would probably listen to this song a dozen times and never notice the drums switch up to match Gabriel's vocal pace on how * you * feel * could * make * it * real. You're going to feel it though, it's going to make the whole thing stickier even if you don't know why. You can really easily imagine that drum fill is going to hit hard in a stage show. It just works really well, it's commercial songcrafting but as commercial songcraft it's good.
All the production is like this. On a first listen this really isn't different from any other Peter Gabriel song or any other Kind Of 80s Sounding Song, and an 80s Sounding Song released in 1992 is always going to have to fight hard to justify being remembered. On repeat listens though there's a lot of care in this mix. The final minutes have this really interesting thing going on with dueling guitar and horn loops that start and stop jaggedly in the mode of the best sample-based music.
In video games, those of us who want the medium to aspire to art often bemoan the way that modern video games are designed like products. There's a level at which wanting things to be otherwise is hopeless— games are products— but there's a specific mode of development where this actually becomes a serious problem. Games are sold on their features, and developed with an eye to those features being met like a checklist. You go into the game with the intent of satisfying the checklist item "immersive world" and "no loading times" and "next-generation foliage system". If you want artistic credibility then that is just another checkbox, "award-winning narrative" tossed on the list next to "next-generation foliage system" and given the same amount of emphasis in development. Maybe another checkbox for "themes". When it comes time to make the game development gets similarly compartmentalized, each of these checkboxes is broken off and handed to a different team. The themes and the award-winning narrative are the responsibility of a writing "team" and that is probably the same size, and must advocate for its interests in larger planning discussions with potentially the same level of political pull as, the next-generation foliage system "team". People who advocate for Games As Art tend to imprint on games with an identifiable "auteur", Hideo Kojima or whoever, who can be credited with imposing a single artistic vision on the product. The auteurs themselves are not all that important (we've all seen this quote), what's important is that without that designated auteur it's likely the game will turn out as just a business developing a product and there will be no single artistic vision at all.
"Steam" is a song developed like a product. There are two producers listed. Wikipedia lists forty-three people on the credits for "Us" (the album). Gabriel gives himself credit lines for production, programming, keyboards, percussion and horn arrangement; and, sure, certainly part of what makes Gabriel's songs such effective pop was that (similar, incidentally, to Phil Collins) Gabriel was able to participate personally in so many elements of recording. But "Steam" specifically also has other people additionally credited for programming, percussion and horn arrangement. Gabriel didn't do all of this himself. Pop in this High 80s mode was a large, involved production involving lots of people whom Gabriel, ultimately, managed (before you even get to the separate "teams" responsible for the music video and stage tour). Peter Gabriel in 1992 was a business (literally, "Us" was released on Real World Records, a label Gabriel founded in 1989) and "Steam" is its output.
And it's not really a problem, here. The end result of all these hands on the product is just a feeling in the final recording that it was really fussed over and cared about. Everyone involved had a task and they performed it expertly. Someone, probably not Peter Gabriel, had the time and the responsibility to very carefully design (and fussily decide should appear in choruses two through five but not one) a single drum fill that got me personally hooked on the song twenty years later. It's commercial art, it's designed and optimized to make money. But it's okay, it works. I like it.
¹ Wikipedia claims that "Sledgehammer", the song, does mean something and that specifically the entirety of the lyrics are actually a long string of dick jokes. I guess in this interpretation the function of the video is to serve as extended misdirection by literalizing all of Gabriel's metaphors. Okay, fine, cute. Whatever.
² There's some material on this tape which is amazing as cultural archaeology but in general most of this tape is not "good". The fact they're resorting to throwing on "Steam" is probably a sign of how desperate they were to fill the tape out. Another sign, the best short on the tape is six years old, from 1988 ("Technological Threat", which is actually great).
³ There's a third Peter Gabriel/Stephen R. Johnson video, "Big Time", which is actually probably better as both a song and a music video than either Sledgehammer or Steam, though not as memorable as either. It's from the same album as Sledgehammer, gives us Johnson at the height of his 80s film-animation powers, and even says something, it has a message which the song and video work together to communicate. The message is "I, Peter Gabriel, am very rich and successful".
⁴ Quoting Wikipedia again: "The director said he wanted to cram the video with as many 'things' as possible". Yeah. I can see that.
