Love Quote by Peter Gabriel

Gabriel is drawing a bright line between two kinds of cultural power: the soft lobbying of “the industry” and the harder-to-corrupt legitimacy of prizes that still pretend to answer to art. The first sentence is almost throwaway in its understatement, which is exactly the point. He treats influence as banal, ambient, inevitable - not a scandal so much as weather. That casual tone carries the subtext: everyone in music knows how awards can be steered, so the shocking part isn’t that it happens, it’s that anyone still believes it doesn’t.

Then he name-checks the Mercury Prize as a kind of sanctuary. “With the Mercury Prize, they don’t” reads like both endorsement and challenge: a public assertion of independence that also dares the listener to test it. Gabriel understands credibility as a scarce resource; you don’t claim it by being pure, you claim it by being seen resisting the usual pressures.

The pivot to “Jon” is strategic humanization. By admitting Jon “comes from the business” while insisting “his heart is still very much in the music,” Gabriel is laundering suspicion into trust. It’s less biography than reassurance: yes, there’s infrastructure and gatekeeping here, but it’s run by someone who won’t let the spreadsheet win.

The final flex - “about 12 major names” wanting in on MUDDA - is a legitimacy play in the language the industry actually respects: star power. Gabriel is trying to build an alternative institution without sounding naive, balancing idealism (music-first) with pragmatism (names-first) so the project can survive the very ecosystem he’s critiquing.