"In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel
Singalong 022: “What’s a boombox,” you ask? Oh man.
“Love, I get so lost sometimes / Days pass, and this emptiness fills my heart”
The trope about Gen X is that we were raised into our semblance of adulthood by the peculiar pop culture of the 80’s, and specifically by MTV.
Boomers had been famously born into an exquisite milieu of social upheaval and culture shifts against which to define themselves. But by the 70’s, most of their idealism had dwindled into mild self-absorption as they struggled with making a living and raising their kids.
If the Unitedstatesian 1950’s had been a house of cards, a fragile order held together by gravity, intention and questionable bonds, the 70s looked like the aftermath of a game of 52 pickup. Disorder, poverty and disillusion reigned. People didn’t bitch as much about gas prices when the very availability of gas was in question.
The sequence from Nixon/Ford to Carter to Reagan/Bush was a dizzying political rollercoaster, the nuclear arms race casting a doomsday shadow on every sunrise. It forced a lot of 80’s parents to grapple with uncertainties and contradictions they’d managed to miss during their heroic youth.
Predictably, many of them failed. So most of my friends in school had divorced parents. It left my generation with big gaps in our sense of order, with a lot of room to explore.
And a lot of time to listen to music.
“When I want to run away, I drive off in my car / But whichever way I go, I come back to the place you are”
The movie “Say Anything” came out in 1989 when I was 15, and I can’t remember when (or even if) I saw it. But it didn’t matter because this song was everywhere for a little while that year. All the girls were raving about the boombox scene. It remains iconic.
“What’s a boombox,” you ask? Oh man.
From Wikipedia: “In October 2012, as Gabriel played the first few bars of “In Your Eyes” during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl, John Cusack walked onto the stage, handed him a boombox and took a bow, before quickly walking off again.”
People really do ask this. Go watch Say Anything, Breakin’ and Do The Right Thing.
“All my instincts, they return / The grand façade, so soon will burn / Without a noise, without my pride / I reach out from the inside”
There’s a lot to love about british pop in the 80’s. These folks were really trying to make musical literature. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Sting et al truly seemed like they wanted to be taken seriously as cultural apostles. And I ate it up. I did not know what this song was talking about, but boy did I want to pretend I did! From Summertime Blues to Spirits in the Material World, it was all a bit beyond my comprehension and I fell for the mystique.
“In your eyes, the light, the heat / In your eyes, I am complete / In your eyes, I see the doorway to a thousand churches / In your eyes, the resolution of all the fruitless searches”
But here we cross a bridge. Most of the love songs I’d heard up to this point treated love as a personal or interpersonal phenomenon. People doing things with each other, feeling things about each other. There’d briefly been a more collective thing in the 60s with “Hair” the musical and songs like “Time of the Season”, but that had given way to the Me generation. Then the 80’s kicked in with the money train, bringing with it a new kind of spiritual idealism. And here’s me, starting to sprout whiskers.
Peter Gabriel turns this love song into a prayer, and I believe this is the key to the song’s success among my generation.
“I wanna touch the light, the heat I see in your eyes”
With so many latchkey kids wandering around town, wondering what love even is, here was devotion in its purest form. Is Peter loving a person or loving God? Does it matter? Both are equally remote in the eyes of the lone seeker. Connecting to either would alleviate the malaise of ascendant materialism.
Or maybe it’s just a makeout song.
“Love, I don't like to see so much pain / So much wasted, and this moment keeps slipping away / I get so tired, working so hard for our survival / I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive”
It can be both. I want to say this was a groundbreaking song, encapsulating a generation’s experience of Love. It’s more remote. It’s not “Peaceful Easy Feeling”. It’s not “Time of the Season”. It’s definitely not “You Outta Know” or “Single Ladies” either, but it’s a stepping stone. Things are getting serious, people were starting to feel more detached from each other in the 80s.
So we got attached to songs.
I heard a guy singing this song in the subway once and had to let a couple of trains go by. People are very attached to it, so let me give it a try:
THANKS for reading and listening. Do you like my stuff? Please help the audience grow by sharing this post with one friend:
Who am I? trevorexter.music
Like and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@trevorexter
Hear my music: the “Trevor Exter Playlist” (Spotify)
Peruse my collection: https://bandcamp.com/xotrmusic
Hear 80 penetrating interviews with great musicians in the Play It Like It’s Music podcast archive.