Stop Throwing It All Away
Old Genesis fans have it rough these days, despite our current and profitable pop culture obsession with all things eighties. We are the wrong kind of nostalgia.
I mean we who are pushing fifty. We who first found the band through the big early-eighties albums Abacab, Genesis, and Invisible Touch. Our fandom was as ardent as Rush’s, as dedicated to particular lifestyle choices as Zeppelin or Van Halen’s. We were soft boys, usually accompanied by our female best friends. We were good students, made no trouble, and were over-represented in band and A.V. club. We were a mild community, emphasis on mild. We hid Reese’s Pieces in our lockers, not weed.
We were pretty invisible then, and still are now. But I suspect there are a lot of us. Someone bought twenty-one million records. Statistically, you were probably one of us, at least a little.
Like fans of other bands, we usually took our radio-play entrance quickly back to earlier records, and got good and lost in their seventies fantasy perambulations. (Zeppelin headbanger: your first record was Coda, but someone gave you Phys Graff quick.) I first started blissing on the china-boy crashes in the bridge of “Abacab,” bought the 45 so I could hear it again and again. But it wasn’t long before I dialed back into Duke, and then A Trick of the Tail and all the rest.
And love for Peter Gabriel-era Genesis has actually aged quite well. A working knowledge of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is now a legitimate cred, something that gives you a perspective on, say, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. Everyone knows it’s a record you need to hear before you die, that you need to have an opinion about, like 2112. If you loved it back in the day, you were ahead of the curve. Your taste is affirmed.
But that’s not what we did in 1986, mostly. Thought about our taste. We mostly just loved when “Tonight Tonight Tonight” showed up on a Michelob commercial or “Miami Vice,” and set our VCRs for it. We dropped “Man on the Corner” or “That’s All” or (gulp) “Illegal Alien” in our Pintos as we drove home from high school, blasting through leafy suburban streets at sensible speeds. And of course we had all the Phil Collins stuff, every monster hit that made America dumb again. We were the ones buying it. We popped the collars on our Lands’ End rugbies and nodded placidly, eased the seat back.
Being almost fifty is hard on us, see, because we now know what we could not know then: those records were bad. Well, Abacab is the strongest of them, by far; it was the first they created through a group improvisational process, and maybe they still had some formed ideas coming into The Farm to track it. But the other two are mostly irredeemable. They are bad records! Critics at the time were mixed, at best; critics in retrospect are (worse) silent. Collins himself has essentially disavowed this part of his career, apologized for giving us what we wanted so completely and gunking up the decade with gated reverb and “oh-ohhhhh!”s. At least he gave Joe Strummer something to push against.
How extraordinary a legacy, then. A non-legacy, a lacuna. How orphaned we are, among our peers who still love what they love. Duran Duran has been vindicated as style leaders; also Depeche Mode, even Def Leppard. Their first fans all have smug houses to live in now that they are grown up. See? We were right. This music ruled. Not us.
What do we make of what we first loved? How do we own it now? What did it do to us, for us?
Well, to start, I’ll go down fighting that grown-ups who loved anything ardently when they were kids are better grown-ups now. I think that wanting a beautiful experience — of any ilk — really shapes who you become, for the better. And if your tastes (and taste) change, under your feet, along the way, no matter: you still loved something enough to listen hard to it. To seek it out, in a time of limited technology and access (and resources: how many lawns did you have to mow to go to a concert?). Being a seeker changes you, for the better. It means that, as a grown up, you are more likely to still be watching and listening to the world. More likely to hear a new beautiful thing and support it; more likely to have a rich inner life where beauty matters, where the space between your ears is recognized as important and cultivated. You don’t have to still care about music when you are grown — but you probably do. If you loved something when you were young, chances are you still love things, and that makes you a better person.
But if you loved Genesis in particular, though? Well, at least you dug something complex and carefully made. Even though our ears now chafe at all the Simmons electronic drums and synths, it was well-crafted music. You learned to become attentive to nuance. And Collins is still a soulful singer, and history will always know him as one. He ain’t Wilson Pickett, but he put you in generally the right direction to love Wilson Pickett, once you found him. And at least you were listening to a great drummer, one of the monsters of the whole rock and roll craft, even before his studio sound became too ubiquitous to hear anymore. You were in a good pocket, most always. That’s a plus.
And something else: you learned how the past colored the present. Because Genesis did hold onto their weird, even as they became pop. For every “Invisible Touch” there’s a “Domino”; every “No Reply at All” has a “Dodo / Lurker.” We got to see people changing who they were, shaping themselves to a market to find the success and acceptance every artist craves (well, except Joe Strummer) while still remaining the same weirdos they started out as. That’s exciting. That’s wholesome. That’s got an integrity to it.
And the whole change happened so quickly. Twelve years after Lamb, what is left of Genesis releases Invisible Touch. Twelve years! The speed of the change; being in the presence of artists who transform in response to what they are hearing in the world and in their own heads. The Beatles are, of course, the cardinal example of this kind of responsiveness and plasticity (and most of us got to them pretty damn quick too — Phil Collins was one of the strongest living heirs of Ringo’s aesthetic when Dave Grohl was trying to pass algebra). But we learned from Genesis that people change, and that change is exciting and good, gives us more to see. That makes us better now, having witnessed such a change in the artistic lives of musicians we love. It perhaps forms us as people who can similarly change and grow.
There’s a reckoning coming: a moment when we won’t have to hide the fact that we still know all the insipid verses to “Throwing It All Away” and drum on our steering wheels to “Mama.” The ardor that burned in us shapes us as people who know ardor. That’s a win, even if we don’t get to talk about it much, or ever. Love is love is love, as the cool kids now say (yeah, even him).
I hope these mild men enjoy their retirement, even as nostalgia passes them by. I hope they got a little royalties jolt from “Glow,” at least.
They shaped me, Phil and Mike and Tony (and Peter and Steve), and maybe one day it will be cool to talk about it.
Wait, I just did. Turn it on again? Maybe not yet. But soon.
