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I recently listened to Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes, and I read an interesting insight about it on Wikipedia. The article foremostly defines the song as "inspired by an African tradition of ambiguity in song". Reading this makes one wonder more about what makes Gabriel's prose so enigmatic.
When reviewing the following three verses, something clicked in my head with the "ambiguity" between the lines:
The grand façade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside
Taking a look at the first and third lines, both are statements which can stand on their own with profoundness. Though, the second line at the middle seems to be adjectival/adverbial in purpose. What statement does it compliment though? The one above or the one below?
Considering the meaning behind the entire song, I found it to be both verses. Going back to the Wikipedia description I quoted, the gist of Gabriel's poetry can be illustrated as "ambiguity in song between romantic love and love of God". The very first word of In Your Eyes is just "love". We can say he's altogether singing about love, the one-word concept, and not as if both types of love are seperate in definition. If Gabriel's song overall implies two meanings of love at the same time, it's thematically fitting that his words are both a blur, figuratively and literally, between the two loves.
Returning to the three verses above, the second verse can gramatically applied to both the first line and the third line. Combining the first and second would mean that the singer will burn his concealing outer-self, without regard to his entire ego and to any self-pitying struggle. Synthesizing the second and third lines instead, would convey that the singer's true self is reaching out to his lover, absent of distractions and selfishness. Both permutations of the three verses serve Gabriel's message, while emphasizing how the the mysticism of love influences his attempt to convey it.
It's certainly hard to discretely notice this at a first or second listen of In Your Eyes, but that also adds to the intentional experience of ambiguity Gabriel gives. His technique can be paralleled to an African musical technique, termed by John McCullough as "layering". The term McCollough defines is familiar to what I can see in Gabriel's method with those selected 3 lines:
"The polyphonic texture is difficult to wrap your head around, as the drums play their own rhythm while the guitar and bass, though sharing a funk music influence, are playing two completely different musical lines. This is evident of layering, as the instruments are placed on top of each other in order to make the entity of the song."
McCullough's conception of dual meaning in the music-piece can be paralleled with my own:
"When writing the song, Gabriel was interested in the idea of there being no difference in African love songs between the love of a woman and the love of God"
For me, writing this analysis down is how I solidify my appreciation for songwriting's capabilities. I appreciate how the three-verses I keep on mentioning can be read and thought about in more than one order, without conflict in chronology and logic of reading. This poetry is unrestrained by time, the conventional way of listening and reading from left to right, and first second to last second. It's why I love it.