ABSTRACT
The three roles taken by Peter Gabriel have been as a creator/performer, as an autodidactic ideologue and as a music-business entrepreneur. This chapter describes and analyses those three roles after a brief discussion of the contested meanings of world music itself, as an aesthetic and commercial category. Peter Gabriel's 'interest in non-Western pop' has manifested itself in his own music-making through collaborations with 'non-Western' musicians in recordings and performances and the occasional recording trip to West Africa or the Amazon river. The characteristics of the autodidact include an eclecticism of intellectual interests that often ignore the categories and divisions of the formal education system, enabling the individual to make unusual or even absurd connections and discoveries. Steven Feld's essay 'A Sweet Lullaby for World Music' uses the contrasting emotions of anxiety and celebration in order to summarize many of the dilemmas, fault-lines and paradoxes of the contemporary genre-world and genre-market.
