Premier Rock Forum

rsmurphy wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2024 9:36 pm I've always fucked with "Against All Odds," "I Wish It Would Rain Down," "Easy Lover," and recently watched a live Genesis performance I thought was cool, but can't remember which one. Never really listened to Genesis. He was handsome in the 70's - tiny, beardy. Had an ex who strikingly bore an 80's resemblance . Feeling generous. Not crap.

Krev wrote: Fri Jan 03, 2025 1:45 am

rsmurphy wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2024 9:36 pm I've always fucked with "Against All Odds," "I Wish It Would Rain Down," "Easy Lover," and recently watched a live Genesis performance I thought was cool, but can't remember which one. Never really listened to Genesis. He was handsome in the 70's - tiny, beardy. Had an ex who strikingly bore an 80's resemblance . Feeling generous. Not crap.

My wife had The Fall Guy movie on, and I heard Against All Odds. There are worse songs out there.

losthighway wrote: Sat Jan 04, 2025 7:22 pm "Another Day In Paradise" was playing at the grocery store last week. A song we all know as children of the 20th century who were raised near radios. But what is that song?

The production is buffed to an air tight perfection. It's freeze dried space ice cream. The melody is so sticky, all of it sounds so overwhelmingly melancholy. But like, who is that song for? It's massive but it gives me no cultural associations at all. I listened to it on my "...but Seriously" cassette, but I was 7. It was just something on my boom box. What was a 20 year old at the concert wearing? What kind of person was a Collins die hard as an older Gen X person? Or was it for everyone and no one in particular? Were we a nation of people humming the keyboard hook while absent mindedly tapping the steering wheel at an interminably long red light under steady rain?

losthighway wrote: Sat Jan 04, 2025 7:22 pm "Another Day In Paradise" was playing at the grocery store last week. A song we all know as children of the 20th century who were raised near radios. But what is that song?

The production is buffed to an air tight perfection. It's freeze dried space ice cream. The melody is so sticky, all of it sounds so overwhelmingly melancholy. But like, who is that song for? It's massive but it gives me no cultural associations at all. I listened to it on my "...but Seriously" cassette, but I was 7. It was just something on my boom box. What was a 20 year old at the concert wearing? What kind of person was a Collins die hard as an older Gen X person? Or was it for everyone and no one in particular? Were we a nation of people humming the keyboard hook while absent mindedly tapping the steering wheel at an interminably long red light under steady rain?

A couple of years ago, Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell wrote a book called The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time in which they ranked [Billy] Joel as the worst rocker ever, with Collins holding down the No. 2 spot. This is an assessment with which I would wholeheartedly agree.

However, I would hasten to point out that the gap between No. 1 and No. 2 is oceanic. In the spot of baseball, Babe Ruth may well be the greatest ballplayer of all time, but he gets serious competition from Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, and several others. Many, perhaps most, classical music aficionados would put Mozart at the top of the heap of composers, but the fact that others would give Bach or Beethoven the nod for the No. 1 spot indicates that Mozart's edge is by no means gargantuan. Michael Jordan may be better than Wilt Chamberlain, but not by much.

In the case of Phil Collins and Billy Joel, the issue far more clear-cut. Collins has written many, many bad songs. But they tend to be blank and overproduced rather than catchy. Phil Collins has one annoying trick that he uses over and over again: those irksome Miami Sound Machine horns wailing away in the background, creating a pseudo-Carnival atmosphere of Cockney salsa. But Phil Collins doesn't lay it on the line the way Billy Joel does. You've never heard anyone quote a line from a Phil Collins song. Sure, "Take Me Home" is a useless tune, as are "In the Air Tonight" and "One More Night." But once they end, you can barely remember what they sounded like. You can only remember that they didn't sound very good.

In summation, Phil Collins is a bald, bland Englishman who writes masses of interchangeably uninteresting songs. Like Joel, Phil Collins reached an impressive level of suckiness at an early point in his career, but unlike Joel he just stayed there. Joel moved heaven and earth to keep getting worse. Moreover, at no time in his career has Collins ever written anything as hypnotically abhorrent as "Captain Jack" or "She's Always a Woman." If I were asked to write down the names of ten Phil Collins songs that suck, I would be incapable of doing so. But I could spit out fifty Billy Joel songs right off the top of my head. In the competition for top honors between the two, I see no contest here.

-- Joe Queenan, Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon, 1998