The Alternative Number Ones: Peter Gabriel’s “Digging In The Dirt”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

They weren't playing Phil Collins on American alternative rock radio. Mike + The Mechanics didn't get any love, either. When Genesis returned with 1991's We Can't Dance, my local modern rock station did not interrupt its steady string of U2 deep cuts so that those guys could Tin Woodsman walk their way across the airwaves. But when that very same station threw onetime Genesis leader Peter Gabriel into rotation, his music never felt incongruous. Gabriel, much like his ex-bandmate Collins, was a former prog-rock frontman who'd become a giant mainstream pop star in the '80s, cranking out expensively recorded inner-world fantasias that got heavy burn on early MTV. But Phil Collins was happy to present himself as a doofy sitcom-dad type. Gabriel was something else: a sonic explorer who only ever seemed to crash the pop charts by accident. His music rarely worked in conversation with whatever was happening in the alt-rock zeitgeist, but with his exploratory sensibility, he belonged.

Alternative rock radio didn't really exist when Peter Gabriel became a pop star. Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, a year after he masterminded their ridiculously ambitious double LP The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. His first solo album, commonly referred to as Car since the first four damn things are all self-titled, came out in 1977. Gabriel remained a favorite among aesthetes for nearly the next decade. He occasionally sent songs into the American pop charts, especially after his strange and attention-grabbing videos went into MTV rotation. MTV also played a huge role in Gabriel's unlikely ascent to pop stardom. Gabriel's video for his 1986 smash "Sledgehammer" is a bugged-out masterpiece. Though nobody has ever fully verified this, it's probably the most-played video in MTV history.