1986 Pop Masterpiece Behind John Cusack's Most Iconic Movie Scene Turns 40 Today
Forty years ago today, Peter Gabriel released So, and nothing about his career, or pop culture, was ever quite the same.
The album hit shelves on May 19, 1986, the former Genesis frontman's fifth solo studio record, put out through Charisma, Virgin, and Geffen Records. Gabriel had begun recording it with producer Daniel Lanois in 1985 at his home studio, fusing African and Brazilian influences with the art rock foundation of his earlier work, staying true to his instincts while making something far more accessible to a wider audience.
The result was often considered his best and most accessible album. So was an immediate commercial success, transforming Gabriel from a cult artist into a mainstream star and becoming his best-selling solo release. It topped the charts in the UK, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands, and reached number two in the United States.
The album's lead single arrived a month before the record itself, and it was unlike anything on radio or television at the time. 'Sledgehammer' reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 26, 1986, but it was the music video, directed by Stephen R. Johnson and produced with animation from Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay, that made history. Using claymation, pixilation, and stop-motion, the clip required Gabriel to lie under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while cameras captured the footage one frame at a time. It went on to win nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987, a record for a single video that has never been broken, and has since been declared MTV's most-played music video of all time. Among the animators working on that shoot: a then-emerging Nick Park of Aardman Animations, who was still refining his work in plasticine and would later go on to create Wallace & Gromit.
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So was more than 'Sledgehammer.' 'Don't Give Up,' a duet with Kate Bush, was originally written with Dolly Parton in mind, but when Parton declined, Bush stepped in, and her delicate vocal gave the song an undeniable beauty. 'Big Time' offered a bombastic, tongue-in-cheek commentary on '80s excess, while 'Red Rain' opened the album on an somber emotional note.
Then there is 'In Your Eyes', a song that found its second life three years after So came out. In Cameron Crowe's 1989 film Say Anything, John Cusack's character Lloyd Dobler stands beneath his girlfriend's window at dawn and holds a boombox above his head playing the song. Crowe had stumbled onto the track while driving to the editing room one day, listening to a cassette left over from his own wedding, and the moment he heard it, he knew. The scene became one of the most parodied and referenced images in modern romantic cinema. Gabriel later reflected that it gave the song 'a second life,' and described himself and Cusack as being 'sort of trapped together in a minuscule moment of contemporary culture.'
So has since been certified five-times platinum in the United States, and Rolling Stone placed it at number 14 on its list of the 100 Best Albums of the '80s. Forty years out, it holds up as a time capsule of a very specific cultural moment when a former art-rock eccentric figured out how to be both himself and unmistakably, inescapably huge.
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This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 8:12 AM.