YMMV / Peter Gabriel

• Accidental Innuendo: From "Games Without Frontiers":
  Hans plays with Lottie
  Lottie Plays with Jane
  Jane plays with Willi
  Willi is happy again
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Atlantic Records, Gabriel's U.S. label at the time, declined to release his third self-titled album because they thought it was uncommercial. Not only did they think it would flop, they thought Gabriel had completely lost his mind. Mercury Records released it instead, with the single "Games Without Frontiers" becoming a hit in the U.K. and reaching the Top 100 stateside. The album also reached number 22 on the Billboard charts and went gold. The Atlantic exec who made the decision to drop Peter Gabriel, John Kalodner, realized his mistake and quickly snapped Gabriel back up for Geffen Records when he moved to the fledgling label, which later reissued the album and held the US distribution rights to Gabriel's 1980-2002 albums all the way until 2010.
• Awesome Music: Lots of it.
• Broken Base: Ask what his best album is, and the responses will vary. While many fans consider So to be his best album, there are a number of fans who consider that album to be overrated and/or a sell-out album, considering one of his self titled albums (or, less frequently, Us or Up) to be his best work instead.
• Covered Up: Thanks in part to its use in a Scrubs season finale, Gabriel's version of "The Book of Love" is more widely known than the original, by The Magnetic Fields.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: While So is Gabriel's most popular album, a lot of fans cite his third self-titled album as his masterpiece.
• Epic Riff: The drum beat on "Intruder", the opener of Melt, played by Phil Collins that introduced the "gated reverb" sound that would dominate the decade to the world.
• Fan Nickname: Peter Gabriel's self-titled solo albums have been dubbed Car, Scratch, and Melt, both referring to their cover art and keeping in line with Gabriel's affinity for single-word album titles. His fourth album was titled Security in the U.S., which has carried over across the Atlantic. The first three all had their nicknames added officially for reissues, while Security reverted back to Peter Gabriel for its own.
• First and Foremost: "In Your Eyes" has been covered by multiple different artists, from Post-Punk to Christian, but none of them have ever even made a dent in the original's popularity.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • For obvious reasons, there's a heavy amount of overlap between Gabriel's fans and Genesis' fans, though moreso Genesis fans who enjoy the band's Gabriel-era material. With Genesis fans who more strictly prefer the Phil Collins-era work, there's more of a Fandom Rivalry with Gabriel's fans. Of the prog-rock leaning fanbase, they also tend to like other prog bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, and King Crimson, also likely due to Gabriel's backing musicians being involved with these acts in some way.
  • Fans of Gabriel's work also tend to be fond of Kate Bush's output and vice-versa, owing to the collaborations between the two on Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" and "Don't Give Up", not to mention the fact that both artists are heavily influential art pop musicians with similar sounds and forms of artistic progression.
  • A noticeable overlap also exists between Gabriel fans and fans of Talking Heads and, by extension, frontman David Byrne, largely owing to Gabriel being a fan of Byrne and the Heads (with Byrne reciprocating the admiration) and due to Gabriel & Byrne being considered kindred spirits in their affinity for eclectic art pop with heavy worldbeat elements, surreal music videos, and appealingly odd live shows.
• Genre Turning Point: Along with Talking Heads' Remain in Light released the same year, Melt was one of the first rock albums to incorporate World Music influences. It also introduced the public to sampled sounds, courtesy of the then-new Fairlight CMI.
• Growing the Beard: Although Gabriel's first two solo albums sold reasonably well, and his debut single "Solsbury Hill" was a breakthrough hit, Melt is generally considered by most people (and by Gabriel himself) as the record where his career as a solo artist truly began to take off, and proof that he could produce substantial work outside of and distinct from Genesis.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One part of the "Sledgehammer" music video features dancing chickens. Fourteen years later, Aardman Animations, who provided special effects for the video, would team up with Dreamworks and make an entire movie about chickens.
  • It's hard to find a video featuring "Sledgehammer," or an online discussion of it, without a bunch of comments to the effect that the hammer is his penis.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • i/o, the planned follow-up to Up, has become the new Chinese Democracy among fans, with many making all sorts of jokes about how long it'll be before the album finally comes out.
  • Playing "In Your Eyes" on a boombox held up at arm's length as a way to make up with someone, started in the film Say Anything....
• Narm Charm: The music video for "Don't Give Up" is Peter and Kate embracing for about 6 minutes straight, which can feel pretty dang awkward when thinking about how they shot it. Not that it makes the song any less heartwarming.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Paranoia Fuel: "I Don't Remember", "Out Out" (from Gremlins, a grade-A example of this), "Intruder", "No Self Control"
• Retroactive Recognition: As noted above, Aardman Animations was the studio behind the music video for "Sledgehammer." The song was released in 1986, only a few years before Aardman Animations would be better known to the public for works like Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run.
• Signature Song: "Sledgehammer" is his most well-known song, with other strong contenders being "Solsbury Hill", "Shock the Monkey", and "In Your Eyes".
• Squick:
  • The song "Mercy Street" is about writer Anne Sexton, and it implies child molestation (among other things). So naturally Gabriel thought it would be appropriate to put one of his daughters in the video (in the linked clip, she appears at about 2:33 in the back of the boat that Gabriel is pushing out to sea).
  • Peter's daughter Melanie often sings backup for him during live performances, which isn't bad in and of itself... but it's a tiny bit awkward when she sings the backup on "Sledgehammer" and when you realize both of his daughters appeared in the video, considering that her father has openly admitted that the song is an Intercourse with You song.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The CGI in the music videos for "Steam" and "Kiss That Frog" have...not aged well, to say the least.

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