"Shock the Monkey" is a 1982 song by Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel

Peter Brian Gabriel is an English singer, musician, and songwriter who rose to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career...

. It was released as a single and peaked at number 29 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100

Billboard Hot 100

The Billboard Hot 100 is the United States music industry standard singles popularity chart issued weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play and sales; the tracking-week for sales begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, while the radio play tracking-week runs from Wednesday...

 chart and number 1 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart. The song was Gabriel's first Top 40 hit in the US. In the UK, the song charted at number 58. It was included on Gabriel's fourth self-titled album, issued in the U.S. as Security. As well as its "relentlessly repeated hook" that "sounded nothing like anything else on the radio at the time", the track is known for its popular and somewhat disturbing music video

Music video

A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...

 featuring Gabriel (in white face paint) and a frightened-looking macaque

Macaque

The macaques constitute a genus of Old World monkeys of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. - Description :Aside from humans , the macaques are the most widespread primate genus, ranging from Japan to Afghanistan and, in the case of the barbary macaque, to North Africa...

.

Interpretation

Due to its title and the content of the video, the song is frequently assumed to be either an animal rights song or a reference to the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist most notable for his controversial study known as the Milgram Experiment. The study was conducted in the 1960s during Milgram's professorship at Yale...

 described in his book Obedience to Authority

Milgram experiment

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that...

. It is neither, although another Gabriel song, "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)", from his 1986 album So

So (album)

So is the fifth studio album by British rock musician Peter Gabriel, released in 1986. Many of its songs reflect a more conventional pop-writing style and became radio hits, while others still retain Gabriel's dark, brooding sense of experimentalism.It is Peter Gabriel's second album produced by...

, does deal directly with Milgram. Gabriel himself has described "Shock the Monkey" as "a love song" that examines how jealousy can release one's baser instincts; the monkey is not a literal monkey, but a metaphor for one's feelings of jealousy.

Releases

"Shock the Monkey" was released as a 7" picture disc in addition to the 7" and 12" black vinyl singles. Club DJ remix service Hot Tracks crafted an 8:12 version that intersperses verses and choruses sung by Gabriel in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 with the more familiar English lyrics. A concert version of the song appears on Gabriel's album Plays Live

Plays Live (album)

Plays Live is the first live and fifth album overall released by British rock musician Peter Gabriel. This album was originally released as a double album and longplay cassette, with sixteen songs and a running time of over 80 minutes...

(1983). It is also included on the compilation albums Shaking the Tree

Shaking the Tree

Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats was released in 1990 as Peter Gabriel's first "greatest hits" album, including songs from his first solo album Peter Gabriel , through Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ...

(1990) and Hit

Hit (album)

Hit is a 2003 compilation album of songs by British musician Peter Gabriel. It reached #29 in the UK album charts and #100 in the US. Disc one is labelled Hit and disc two Miss, reflecting the first disc's containing several of Gabriel's biggest-selling singles.The two-disc set is different in the...

(2003). The music video appears on the DVD compilation Play

Play (DVD)

Play: The Videos is a compilation DVD of music videos by Peter Gabriel, released in 2004. The DVD contains remastered audio tracks of songs in DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound...

(2004).

Remix contest

An online contest was held in September 2006 by Realworld Remixed in which musicians and engineers were invited to submit a remix of the song. The original tracks were made available for download, offering a rare opportunity to work with the raw material from a hit song. The winner was Multiman

David Downes (New Zealand composer)

David Downes, born 1967 in Wellington, New Zealand, is a composer of theatre and film scores, orchestral and electro-acoustic pieces. He is particularly known for his work with choreographers, and for dance-inspired music, including two CD releases, Saltwater and The Rusted Wheel of Things .Downes...

's "Simian Surprise".

Charts

Chart (1982/1983) Peak Position U.S. Billboard Billboard (magazine) Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis... Hot 100 29 Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks 1 Billboard Dance/Disco Hot Dance Club Play The Hot Dance Club Songs chart is a weekly national survey of the songs that are most popular in U.S. dance clubs... 26 Billboard Hot Black Singles Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, is a chart released weekly by Billboard in the United States.The chart, initiated in 1942, is used to track the success of popular music songs in urban, or primarily African American, venues. Dominated over the years at various times by jazz, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, soul,... 64 U.S. Cashbox Pop Singles 33 UK Pop Singles 58

Coal Chamber feat. Ozzy Osbourne version

The alternative metal

Alternative metal

Alternative metal is a genre of alternative rock and heavy metal that gained popularity in the early 1990s. Most notably, alternative metal bands are characterized by heavy guitar riffs and experimental approaches to heavy music.-Origins:...

 band Coal Chamber

Coal Chamber

Coal Chamber is an American alternative metal band formed in Los Angeles, California in 1993. Prior to Coal Chamber, Dez Fafara and Meegs Rascón formed the band She's In Pain in 1992. The two decided to create Coal Chamber. They disbanded in 2003 after ten years together, but announced a reunion in...

 covered "Shock the Monkey" on their 1999 album Chamber Music

Chamber Music (Coal Chamber album)

Chamber Music is the second studio album by Californian alternative metal band Coal Chamber, released on Roadrunner Records on September 7, 1999....

. The cover featured guest vocals by Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy Osbourne

John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne is an English vocalist, whose musical career has spanned over 40 years. Osbourne rose to prominence as lead singer of the pioneering English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, whose radically different, intentionally dark, harder sound helped spawn the heavy metal...

.

Track listing

1. "Shock the Monkey" (Album Version)
2. "Shock the Monkey" (Gorilla Mix)
3. "El Cu Cuy" (Man-To-Monster Mix)

Music video

Directed by Dean Karr

Dean Karr

Dean Karr is an American photographer and music video, commercial, and film director.-Official biography:Director/Photographer Dean Karr's signature style, often copied but never...

. It shows the band playing with Ozzy and it has shots of a Monkey.

Other cover versions

• Hawaii
  Hawaii
  Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
  
  an recording artist Don Ho
  Don Ho
  Donald Tai Loy "Don" Ho was a Hawaiian and traditional pop musician, singer and entertainer.-Life and career:Ho, of Chinese, Hawaiian, Portuguese, Dutch, and German descent, was born in the small Honolulu neighborhood of Kakaako, but he grew up in Kāneohe on the windward side of the island of Oahu...
  
   covered "Shock the Monkey" on the 2002 compilation album When Pigs Fly: Songs You Never Thought You'd Hear.
• Finnish metal band Suburban Tribe
  Suburban Tribe (band)
  Suburban Tribe was a rock band from Finland. The band is notable for containing the members of two of Finland's greatest thrash metal bands, Stone and Airdash. Bassist Janne Joutsenniemi played in the band Stone and guitarist Roope Siren played in Airdash. In the beginning, the bands name was...
  
   covered "Shock the Monkey" on their 2007 album Recollection.
• The Vitamin String Quartet featured the song on their Peter Gabriel tribute album

Use in other media

• "Shock the Monkey" is included in the opening sequence to the film, Project X.
• The song is used in the South Park
  South Park
  South Park is an American animated television series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central television network. Intended for mature audiences, the show has become famous for its crude language, surreal, satirical, and dark humor that lampoons a wide range of topics...
  
  episode "Raisins". After Wendy breaks up with Stan
  Stan Marsh
  Stanley Randall "Stan" Marsh is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is voiced by and loosely based on series co-creator Trey Parker. Stan is one of the show's four central characters, along with his friends Kyle Broflovski, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman...
  
  , he asks Wendy's friend Bebe how to win her back. She tells Stan to "stand outside her window, and play Peter Gabriel" (a reference to Lloyd Dobler's actions in the movie Say Anything), so he chooses this song to play on the boombox.

See also

• List of number-one mainstream rock hits (United States)