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12"
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GEF 1222EP
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"A master at maneuvering between the vastly rewarding world of pop & the creative demands of experimental music, Peter Gabriel stands as one of the chief inheritors of uncompromising popular music of the 1960s, not so much in his aesthetic inheritances as much as his fortitude to uphold & maintain artistic integrity in the face of mass popularity and major label demand. As the founding member of the ever-popular Genesis, by 1980 Gabriel had already accumulated the experience and technique that would later inform his superior solo work with a sort of uncanny ability to translate the esoteric oddities of experimental, ambient and synth music with a formidable aptitude at pop writing and production that allowed him to live his notorious double life: part modern pop icon, part ambient & international music curator, founding the Real World label & creating one of the most influential soundscape full-length's of the 20th century in The Last Temptation of Christ. Even some his most well know work exudes the same imaginative, haunted & dream-like melancholy of his most abstruse music, alternating from cheerful lyrical insightfulness & unsettling melodic darkness, comprising one of the most powerful and intelligent musical legacies of the 1980s and beyond. 'Games Without Frontiers' has taken the step beyond super-hit into the cult reverence it now enjoys today, a classic example of eternal pop-rock brilliance: the supreme parody of the dangerous absurdities of European nationalism and a direct response to the dawning of a massive conservative backlash in his homeland of the United Kingdom. Ironically 'Games Without Frontiers' was most successful in the two leading nations of imperial might at the time, the United States and the U.K., a shining example of the powers wielded by an artist balancing the paradoxical status of massively famous and critically unbendable. Indeed, it is this uncompromising creative militancy, one that Gabriel has steadfastly honored and harbored with adamant resolve, that has elevated him from the typical ineffectuality of most top-40 artists to the reputable champion of the creative edge that operates as the vanguard of good pop music, without which the genre and the concept itself withers away in irrelevance and artificiality."
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