No Self Control (WIP) (Patreon)

Sorry for the unfinished essay. I haven't put out a single paid post this month and was starting to panic about my next paycheck. Life's been particularly difficult this semester of college, so writing the blog is now more difficult than ever. I'll post the rest of the essay for all patrons free of charge before it hits WordPress. 

Reading, 1979 (w/ Phil Collins)

No Self Control (demo)

No Self Control

Top of the Pops

Athens, 1987

London, 2013

29 Dreams of Orgonon supporters on Patreon can’t be wrong! Why not join them and read next week’s post on “Delius” as soon as it’s written? 

“No Self Control” is a test pilot for Kate Bush as well as Peter Gabriel. Melt utilizes a number of tricks that Bush and Gabriel would both use in subsequent albums. It marks the first time Gabriel used the Fairlight CMI, which was a central building block of his followup LP Security and as crucial an instrument for Kate Bush as her Steinway piano. The songs of Melt were constructed rhythm-first, as opposed to rock music’s standard focus on building a song from its melody, a practice Kate Bush adopted shortly afterwards. Try listening to Gabriel and Bush’s albums of the early 80s in chronological order: the parallels are brazen and fascinating.

Last week’s diversion into this temporarily being a Peter Gabriel blog was mostly a signal for where Bush’s music would go. So far, Never for Ever’s songs have been a slight evolution of the songwriting of The Kick Inside and Lionheart. So far we’ve gotten two piano rock songs, a chintzy Orientalist number borrowed from Bush’s only tour, and a leftover song from Bush’s demo years. Most of them are quite good, but Bush might have faded into obscurity if the rest of the album followed those songs’ trajectory. 

After Bush took a break from recording Never for Ever to cut “Games Without Frontiers” and “No Self Control” with Gabriel, her songwriting underwent noticeable stylistic changes. The post-Gabriel tracks of Never for Ever make use of rhythm boxes and the Fairlight CMI, which Bush was introduced to by Gabriel. The album’s remaining songs click differently, relying on atypical rhythm patterns and building melodies with sampled sounds (with a more disjointed vocal style that’ll flourish on The Dreaming especially). We’ll cover the Fairlight synth in more depth when we talk about those songs, but suffice it to say that as one of the first digital samplers, it’s an incredibly important piece of music history. Gabriel was the first British artist to own the CMI, integrating this weird new technology into his work and setting trends that would last beyond the 80s, encompassing artists like Stevie Wonder, Duran Duran, Yes, and Hans Zimmer. Equally crucial for Melt’s sound is its newfound investment in rhythm, which, as mentioned previously, is a change from the melody-centric state of affairs of rock. Gabriel uses his experience as a drummer to write songs from the rhythm up, saying “I think the rhythm track is always the spine of a piece of music, and if you change the rhythm track you change the spine, and hence the body that falls around that.” Thus the album shows Gabriel turning towards musical instincts nurtured by African drumming and minimalist compositions, with his strong pop songwriting skills brushing against challenging musical circumstances.

Melt’s major test engine for Gabriel’s new approach to rhythm is “No Self Control,” an astonishing song and a career highlight for the singer. It’s a song where the lyrics follow the music, which defines itself by its rhythm and musical idiosyncrasies before its verbal contents. “This song was written around that insistent rhythm,” said Gabriel, “and its gave me the idea of this inability to stop…. I think it’s partly a modern state of mind, this continual need for stimulation.” The song’s sense of movement is continuous: it begins with a synth line that starts and stops consistently, then a funky sounding melody line that sounds like the horn-led opening of a funk song (indeed, the demo uses brass in this part), followed by Robert Fripp’s always-individual guitar contributions, and finally a simultaneous marimba part (possibly synthesized) and a single-note backing vocal by Kate Bush (“ah-ah-ah-ah”). Soon the morass of sounds subsides, save for the first synth part and the marimbas, giving way to Peter Gabriel’s trepidatious vocal: “got to get some food/I’m so hungry all the time,” which sounds like a scared boy who’s afraid his search for nourishment will get him shot, is immediately followed by Gabriel’s tormented cry of “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO STOP/I DON’T KNOW HOW TO STOP.” 

A couple similar verses follow Gabriel’s hunger, showing that the singer’s need to do things extends to sleep and communication (“got to pick up the phone/I will call any number/I WILL TALK TO ANYONE”), with the latter breaking into a sort of pre-chorus, building into the explosive chorus joined by the recognizably melodramatic drumming of Phil Collins, John Giblin’s sturdy bass playing, and Fripp tearing ass on his guitar. What follows is one of the best choruses ever, with that explosive lineup underlining Gabriel uttering a series of paranoid declarations: “there are always hidden silences/waiting behind the chair,” “lights go out/stars come down/like a swarm of bees.” If there’s an accurate summation of severe anxiety and mental health catastrophes in music, it’s that. 

The song’s polyrhythms are as signature to its power as Gabriel’s lyrics. While being a tightly constructed track, “No Self Control” works precisely because of its musical elements working against each other: the synth parts are distinct from the marimbas, and Gabriel’s vocal melody doesn’t obviously extend from any instrumental part. The song is an amalgam of different approaches, creating a sense of distracted upset that manages listenability with a harmonious pop sensibility. Being stressed can be like this: a number of problems keeping one active at all times of the day and blending into a single mass of anxiety. 

The collision of musical approaches here — there are rock bits, of course, and Gabriel doing “world music” before it became gauche and ubiquitous — is functional, but a lot of it comes from outside influence. “No Self Control” was Gabriel’s attempt to integrate the style of minimalist composer Steve Reich into his own work. This was a high-brow choice of artistry to take inspiration from — Steve Reich is one of the late 20th century’s most famous composers and one of the key figures of minimalist music. [Placeholder — Reich, Music for 18 Musicians]

Peter Gabriel is far from the only popular artist to be influenced by Reich (who can count Brian Eno, King Crimson, and Sufjan Stevens among his fans), but the weaving of Reich-like tendencies into “No Self Control” is surprisingly deft. Of course there’s no way to make a [time] single properly sound like Music for 18 Musicians, but the song’s use of polyrhythms and a shifting staccato pulse in the background works in its favor. The song gains an astounding sense of space and alienation from their presence. The verses gain a sense of static propulsion from this element of the song — Gabriel’s numb consumptiveness is given constant motion by its rhythmic backbone.