The Book of Love. Peter Gabriel. 2010. Real World/Virgin.

 The broad range of musical styles typified by the Peter Gabriel songbook suggests a serious pop artist with a keen curiosity and creative intelligence always at work. Like the David Bowie catalog, Gabriel’s studio output vacillates from material with broad commercial appeal to art rock experimentation. He was a fixed and always welcome presence on FM American radio before the video generation made him a global superstar, as if by some freak-inspired unanimity it had been decreed that what our young, drug and alcohol soaked imaginations needed was his personal, always elegantly narrated nightmares. Released in 2010, Scratch My Back is Gabriel’s dual artist project that had him covering a variety of songs by artists who then each recorded a Peter Gabriel song. For The Magnetic Fields’ The Book of Love, from their majestic 1999 tour de force 69 Love Songs, Gabriel turns his vocal maturity into a studio tool as effective as any electronic or acoustic device for adding a layer of richness and depth to what The Magnetic Fields had already made sublime. The subject of the song is love’s wonder, the details and habits that lovers acquire over the course of a relationship: the dancing and the boredom, the time spent reading or singing to one another, every action or dynamic seen from the ritual perspective of love’s impermanent spell. Gabriel frames this romanticism with grandiloquent pop timelessness, that dreamworld of fevered passion and, as songwriter Stephin Merritt tells us, “things we’re all too young to know.” In our terminal age of real time advertisement-sponsored TV broadcasts of the apocalypse, our escape into pop music past and present is really a path back to ourselves, the funhouse mirrored effect of the criminal’s interminable return to the scene of the crime. Powered by the shock to the monkey.

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