the first round
(8) phil collins, “another day in paradise”
defeated
(9) three dog night, “joy to the world”
163-105
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 6.
Jacket Required: elisa gabbert on “another day in paradise” & Phil Collins’ Yuppie Rock
An aspect of research I do not enjoy is finding out that everything I thought I knew about a subject was wrong. For years I have carried a belief in my head that the term “yacht rock” derives from the cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s 1977 album CSN, which features a photograph of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash—in that order, no less—chillaxing on a sailboat. If I can believe the internet, this isn’t the case—the term did not exist until 2005 and was coined by J. D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham, the creators of a mockumentary web series about the musical genre which was known in its own time, the late 1970s and early 80s, as “the West Coast Sound” or “adult-oriented rock.” According to these fellows, mockumentarists turned podcasters, and their acolytes, yacht rock—a derogatory category that, like “dad jokes,” we’ve decided to embrace, because liking things we used to mock is bizarrely exhilarating—is not an umbrella term for any song “about a boat, or the ocean, or sailing.” Timothy Malcolm, a food editor with strong feelings on this topic, writes that yacht rock “can be characterized as smooth and melodic, and typically combines elements of jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock,” with “very little acoustic guitar” but lots of “Fender Rhodes electric piano.” The “folkie songs” of Crosby, Stills & Nash, he adds, decidedly do not qualify.
This bums me out, because when I choose a Yacht Rock station on a streaming music service, the first song I want to hear is never the inevitable first song, “Sailing” by Christopher Cross, one of the available options in this tournament of badness. What I want to hear is “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills & Nash. There’s a video on YouTube, which I’ve watched dozens of times, of the trio playing this song live at a concert in 1982. It was still pretty much their heyday—the album they were touring, Daylight Again, went platinum—but what I love about the video is that they already look washed up. I am inordinately fond of these dorks in their various stages of balding, overweight, and just unfashionable. Despite the acoustic guitars, the song displays many defining aspects of yacht rock: It’s “bubbly” and melodic, “yet oddly complex and intellectual” to use Malcolm’s words. The yacht has to bear a lot of metaphorical weight: “So I’m sailing for tomorrow, my dreams are a dyin’ / And my love is an anchor tied to you, tied with a silver chain / I have my ship and all her flags are a flyin’ / She is all I have left and music is her name.” Stills wrote the lyrics, he explained in the liner notes to the CSN box set, “about a long boat trip I took after my divorce … it’s about using the power of the universe to heal your wounds.” The themes of “reassuring vague escapism” and “heartbroken, foolish men,” sailing away from their problems, are also key features of the genre—the first episode of Yacht Rock is about the writing of the song “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers.
There’s a scene in the 1984 action/romance movie Romancing the Stone where Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner take shelter in a wrecked cargo plane in the jungles of Colombia. The plane was transporting weed, a kilo of which he proceeds to throw into the campfire. Stoned, they get to chatting, while the Douglas character (“Jack T. Colton”) idly flips through an old issue of Rolling Stone he finds in the plane. He sits up and cries out, “Aw, goddamn it man, the Doobie Brothers broke up.” (I found this line hilarious as a child, though I could not possibly have understood almost anything about it—who the Doobie Brothers were, when they broke up, what “doobie” means or the effects of marijuana—I think we must appreciate the formal properties of jokes before we understand their content.) I bring this up because the movie ends with Jack buying a boat—paid for by selling the giant emerald that was eaten by an alligator they had confronted in Cartagena—so they can literally sail away together. The fantasy of boat life was fundamental to the yuppie dreams of the 80s, and at least as important as the fantasy of sailing itself was the fantasy of being able to afford a boat.
Yacht rock, at its tail end, aged into yuppie rock, alternatively known in my own mind as suit rock: think Huey Lewis, Robert Palmer, and of course Phil Collins. In the early days of Genesis, he was post-hippie prog rock, photographed in fleece-lined jackets or shirtless and in cutoffs, with long hair and a surprisingly lush beard, but at the time of my first exposure to Collins, when I was beginning to form memories and an identity, around ’84/’85, he was always in a suit. He wears a suit—an abstract-print jacket over a white shirt, fully buttoned but without a tie—in the video for “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” my sentimental favorite Phil Collins song. In his memoir, Not Dead Yet, he says he wrote most of the song back in 1979, around the same time as “In the Air Tonight,” but he didn’t finish it until the director Taylor Hackford asked him for a song for the soundtrack to his 1984 movie Against All Odds (which is kind of a good movie, worth watching if for no other reason than seeing Jeff Bridges at peak hotness—he plays an ex-pro football player). He wears a suit—a double-breasted tan suit, with a yellow tie—in the video for “Easy Lover,” his duet with Philip Bailey from Earth, Wind & Fire, a song that in the past few years has begun to follow me everywhere; I seem to hear it on car radios or over the PA system in grocery stores about a once a week. (I’m not complaining.) He wears a suit—gray, double-breasted, yellow tie, white sneakers—in the video for “Sussudio,” a nonsense word that Collins says came “out of nowhere.” “I can’t think of a better word that scans as well as ‘sussudio,’ so I keep it and work around it,” he says in his (ghost-written) memoir. This makes no sense at all, since what he actually sings is “susussudio,” with an extra syllable. “If I could have a pound for every time I’ve been asked what the word means,” Collins says, “I’d have a lot of pounds” (doesn’t he?). (The whole memoir, for some reason, is written in the present tense, so you get sentences like, “Things are bad at home—his wife Jill is having a difficult pregnancy, which is not something I’m aware of at the time.”) He’s wearing a suit in the video for “One More Night”—the video is black & white, so it’s hard to say exactly what color the suit is, but even in grayscale it looks like his signature yellow tie. He’s wearing a suit in the video for “Two Hearts”—actually several different suits, since he plays every player in his band in the video. He wears a suit—gray sleeves pushed up to the elbow—in a Michelob commercial from 1986 that is almost a video for the Genesis song “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.” This commercial, a montage of concert footage and steamy yuppie nightlife in what I took to be downtown Manhattan, informed my whole idea of adulthood. (I never noticed, but apparently the song is actually about drug addiction, so using it to sell beer is kind of like playing “Pink Houses” at the Republican National Convention.)
I honestly love this era of Phil Collins. George Bradt, a research analyst at MTV from 1983 to 1988, has said, “The best ‘testing’ artist of all was probably Phil Collins. Research showed that viewers never got tired of his videos, so they were played regularly, months or even years after they were hits.” He was writing and recording both with Genesis and as a solo artist, doing production work or drumming for people like Eric Clapton and Robert Plant (whom he calls “Planty”), and appearing on benefit singles like “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and in benefit concerts like Live Aid. He was ubiquitous, and now he has a kind of sheepish defensiveness about his success, like Could I help it if I couldn’t stop writing gold hits? At one point in Not Dead Yet, he says that No Jacket Required sold 25 million copies—“I only know this because I looked it up on Wikipedia”! “In the eye of the tornado” he couldn’t be bothered to keep up with his sales. It was a baffling choice for the name of his ’85 album, considering his penchant for jackets. The story is that he and Planty were trying to get a drink at a hotel bar in Chicago, but they wouldn’t let him in without a jacket. “I am wearing a jacket,” Collins said. “A proper jacket, sir … Not leather,” the bar man replied. “I’ve always hated stuffiness and snobbery,” Collins writes, “so No Jacket Required becomes my album title and, yes, why not, ethos.” Collins’ album titles are uniquely terrible—why so many ellipses? He titled his first hits album …Hits.
Phil Collins’ discography fascinates me because his good songs are so good and his bad songs are so bad. I truly hate “A Groovy Kind of Love,” a cover song from 1988—it is unlistenably bad, much more offensive than the original version, recorded by The Mindbenders, a beat rock group, in 1965. Collins slows it down to the syrupy tempo of a music box lullaby. “Another Day in Paradise” is down at the bottom with it. From his 1989 album …But Seriously, the single was a No. 1 hit and won a Grammy for Record of the Year. It’s odd because, and I guess this could be true for every song in the tournament, I think of it as a song that everyone always despised. (It stands to reason that the more popular something is, the more well-known it is, the more people have the opportunity to hate it: the Eagles Greatest Hits effect.) I remember reading an article in Sassy magazine in the early 90s in which a male, possibly British staffer made fun of Collins’ worrying over the homeless problem, writing something very close to, “Maybe it’s because you have all the money, ya bald bastard.” Collins’ yuppie era had given us tracks like “Take Me Home,” one of the good ones, a song that fits right in with the exhaustion porn power ballads of hair metal (see Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” or Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home”). “I’ve been a prisoner all my life,” Collins sings, which makes me think of Lady Gaga recently tweeting, “Fame is prison.” The video shows him traveling the world—lip syncing in front of international destinations from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House to the Hollywood sign. But the 80s were almost over, and people were starting to tire of yuppie excess. Some of them, at least, were also starting to tire of Phil Collins. His management supposedly called MTV and asked them to play his videos less.
“I’m loath to use the dreaded eighties phrase ‘conscience rock,’” Collins says, but he wasn’t so loath to write conscience rock. He got the idea for “Another Day in Paradise” during the tour for Invisible Touch. When the band landed in D.C., Collins asked their driver about “the cardboard boxes lined along the pavements in the shadow of the Capitol Building.” He was “gobsmacked” to learn they were “the homes of the homeless”—“so many of them, so close to all this wealth and power.” Dude, one can’t help but think. The song was seen as exploitative by many, just clueless and cringey by others. I’m not entirely sure why the Genesis song “Land of Confusion,” which also has a “message,” feels less cheesy and detestable—maybe because it’s more upbeat, with a sort of funny video (featuring life-size puppets of Ronald and Nancy Raegan). Its politics are also vaguer, a general less-war, more-peace vibe: “There’s too many men, too many people / Making too many problems / And not much love to go round.” It’s a reminder for the youth that good politics are much more aligned with age cohorts than generations. Mike Rutherford, who wrote the lyrics, was born in 1950. “My generation will put it right,” Collins sings, “We’re not just making promises that we know we’ll never keep.” (OK, boomers.) The video is going for laughs, though—it ends with the Ronald puppet trying to call for his nurse and accidentally hitting the “Nuke” button instead.
“Another Day in Paradise” is comparatively maudlin, maudlin by any standards really. It takes itself utterly seriously. The video begins with a shot of Earth from space, a version of the “Blue Marble” image that famously inspired the environmental movement. (Many astronauts claim that seeing our planet from space completely changed their perspective on global relations, a phenomenon known as the “overview effect.”) As we zoom into Earth, the color goes sepia tone: instant melancholy. In between clips of Collins singing with a highly furrowed brow, we see a bunch of still shots of homeless people sleeping in the street, a few stats about homelessness in all-caps text (“3 MILLION HOMELESS IN AMERICA”) as if in a PowerPoint presentation. Some of these images are really harrowing—a shirtless child lying on newspaper, a flap of cardboard over his head. Watching the video again as I write this, for the first time in many years, I don’t know quite how to feel about it. Because I am that bitch, of course I think of Sontag, who writes in Regarding the Pain of Others that for “antiwar polemicists,” “war is generic” and images of war “are of anonymous, generic victims.” As such a photo of a child killed in wartime might be used toward any end, to justify any position: “Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.” You can look at all painful images as manipulative, in this light. In Collins’ case, a slideshow of the homeless is being used to sell records. He did donate a bunch of money to homeless shelters during this time, though—his intentions weren’t terrible. I think I hate the song in part because I can’t entirely hate it; my distaste is too close to ambivalence. The piano part is undeniably catchy. It’s a song I might catch myself humming along to before, with a jolt, I remember I don’t like it and change the station.
Collins’ appeals for sympathy in Not Dead Yet read as kind of pathetic, and he knows it. In a passage about his former bandmate Peter Gabriel (Gabriel left Genesis in 1975), Collins writes:
I do envy Pete. There are some songs he’s written that I wish I’d written—for one thing “Don’t Give Up,” his gorgeous duet with Kate Bush. But even here at the height of my success it seems that, for every achievement or great opportunity that comes my way, I’m starting to accrue bad press as a matter of course. Pete seems to get good press seemingly equally automatically. It seems a bit unfair, which I appreciate is a pathetic word to use in this context. A few years later, in 1996, when I release Dance into the Light, Entertainment Weekly will write: “Even Phil Collins must know that we all grew weary of Phil Collins.”
For Phil Collins to whinge about unfairness is of course absurd—but he kind of has a point. Critical attention and favor are whimsical; some great artists are recognized in their time, while others are not; otherwise Herman Melville wouldn’t have died in near poverty. This is not to say that Peter Gabriel isn’t good, just that it can always be counted as luck—coincidence, even—when good art is appreciated in kind. (I too wish I wrote “Don’t Give Up,” because then I’d get to be in the video, hugging Kate Bush for six and a half minutes straight.) Pathetic or not, Collins is a somewhat sympathetic figure, to me. In late life, as he tells it in the memoir’s penultimate chapter, he moved to Switzerland to be near two of his kids, though he had divorced their Swiss mother; he became a full-blown alcoholic out of sheer boredom. He eventually had to be put on Antabuse, which blocks the enzyme that allows your body to metabolize alcohol, so he could stop drinking and not die of pancreatitis. (Duff McKagan, the bassist from Guns N’ Roses, almost died this way too—after years of drinking ten bottles of wine a day, an effort to cut back after years of drinking gallons of vodka, his pancreas burst and gave him third-degree burns on his internal organs. In the ER, the morphine they gave him had next to no effect. He begged the doctors to kill him.)
Nothing Collins says in his book is especially insightful. (When I was reading it, or skimming it anyway, I saw a conversation on Twitter about who qualifies as a “writer’s writer.” I joked that Phil Collins is definitely not that, and at least four or five people replied that he is, however, a “drummer’s drummer.”) I’m just fond of him, the way I’m fond of fat David Crosby, who sang backing vocals on “Another Day in Paradise.” (They sang it together on the Arsenio Hall show! Collins wears a gray suit over a black shirt with an improbably large collar, almost forming its own bowtie; Crosby’s mustache, the ideal mustache, maybe the only mustache in history I like, and his mutton chops are nearing full gray.) I’m fond of Collins’ hairline, a deep male-pattern-baldness version of a widow’s peak, like the grandpa from The Munsters but fluffier. I’m fond of his corny dance moves, the little toe taps and bounces. And I’m fond of his wardrobe, the bucket hats and Hawaiian shirts, the pleated pants, the sweater vests over polos and, yes, the suits. They remind me of a brief time when it seemed cool to be an adult, and to do adult signifier things like work on Wall Street and have an accountant. I may not have yearned for a yacht per se, but I couldn’t wait to be old enough to wear shoulder pads and “pumps,” to go to a franchise fern bar and order something like an Irish coffee. Adulthood meant freedom of choice, and that, to me, was glamour—not sailing but the ability, the option to sail.
I was six or whatever, so I didn’t understand that by the time I was old enough to do those things, they wouldn’t be cool anymore. I experience this as an actual loss: I never got to have that alternate life as an adult in the 80s. Nostalgia is a kind of pain
Elisa Gabbert is a poet and essayist and the author of four collections: The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018), L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian Long Read, The London Review of Books, A Public Space, The Paris Review Daily, and many other venues. The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays is forthcoming in August 2020 from FSG Originals.
danielle evans on “joy to the world”
Certainly, if you want to think too hard about it, “Joy to the World” poses some curious questions. Where did the bullfrog get the wine? When we give in to our appreciation of slant rhyme and go to throw away the cars and the bars and the war, why are we throwing away all of the cars but only one the one war, and are we throwing away the bars, as in all the drinking establishments where the beverages aren’t served by our friend the bullfrog, which seems to lack sound moral basis, or the bars as in the things imprisoning us? Is the you of the second stanza the same as the you of the chorus and if so, what happened in the chorus between the singer announcing his intention to throw everything else out and only make sweet love to you and the verse where he proclaims himself to be a high-life flyer who loves the ladies, because frankly that shift seems unlikely to have been universally joyful for everyone, and also perhaps at odds with his claim to be a straight-shootin’ son of a gun? If the joy is for the whole world, how did the fishes in the sea earn being singled out? Approximately how many times in the history of seasonal parties has this song accidentally ended up on someone’s holiday playlist?
But is this song “bad”? Can you listen to it without dancing a little, without singing along? Can you not feel—dare I say it—joy? Are you betting on the kind of future where you can afford to reject joy because it’s a little silly? Maybe it is a fleeting joy—the joy of good wine, the joy of wherever the night you meet a man who introduces himself by telling you he loves the ladies and loves to have his fun is headed, the joy of wordless communication with your closest, tipsiest, froggiest friends, the joy of whatever magic one might be under the influence of to sing Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was a good friend of mine as a placeholder lyric, and decide to let it ride, as Hoyt Axton claims he did. But I am writing this in January 2020—the war Axton meant, in all its unhealed wounds, and the forever war in all its incarnations, is still with us, the cars haven’t gone anywhere and the planet can tell. I am writing from a country where the prison bars contain more of us than ever, even, lately, babies, and the drinking bars can’t comfort our perpetual anxiety, from a country where time can move in ugly circles, where when my parents were born they could have legally been denied the right to vote in many states, and when I was born I could not have been, but increasingly it seems that could change by the time I die. I am writing from a world where at the rate water is coming to reclaim things, the fishes might just be joyful because they’re waiting us out, though at the rate the water is heating, the fishes won’t make it either. Is this the kind of time when you’re going to be picky about what kind of joy you get?
*
A few years ago, in the second year of having stage four cancer, my mother went to a hospital to have a complicated, somewhat experimental surgery that would take up to eight hours if it went well. When you accompany someone to the hospital for a surgery of that length, the waiting room has color coded screens so you can see what stage of the surgery your loved one is in without nagging the hospital staff all day, and they give you a buzzer, the same kind you’d get waiting for a food order or a table at a busy restaurant, so that you can leave the waiting room and be summoned back if needed. I walked to the hospital gift shop. I was summoned back. It had barely been an hour. My mother had been cut open and the doctors had immediately seen all the cancer that hadn’t showed up on the scans and concluded that the surgery couldn’t happen after all. She was not a good candidate for curing. She woke up with the grogginess of anesthesia and the pain of a surgical incision and the news that there was no good news.
I had canceled my first week of classes because I planned on staying with my mother in the hospital for a week or longer, but as it turned out we would only be there a few days. She was moved out of the surgical ward by the end of the day but could stay in the residential rooms attached to the cancer hospital until she was recovered from the incision, in case healing was complicated by all the chemo she’d had. My mother rested. I padded around the residential wing in my pajamas. I curled into a chair in the lounge and ate the free cereal bars on offer there because the cafeteria felt like too much work. I gave a handful of people updates about my mother’s condition, varying in degree of specificity and truthfulness, as she had instructed before the surgery. My phone dinged with increasingly insistent messages from a man I’d met in a bar some weeks earlier, who wanted to know when he could take me to dinner and why I wasn’t responding to him. I muted the phone. A white woman asked me to fix the coffee machine and seemed skeptical when I told her I didn’t work there. I left the lounge and went back to the gift shop.
When my mother was awake enough for conversation, she asked what I’d been doing all morning. I told her I had gone to the gift shop and had a comforting conversation with a stuffed giraffe. I described the giraffe. She wanted to see him, so I brought her downstairs, where the giraffe was front and center in the gift shop entrance. He was plush and nearly five feet tall.
“He really is a handsome giraffe,” she said. “I thought you were just being silly to try to make me feel better.”
“I wouldn’t lie about a giraffe,” I said. “He’s a good giraffe.”
We bought the giraffe. We could not really afford an enormous stuffed giraffe, who would cost as much in various forms of transit as he did to buy, but we bought him nevertheless and took him upstairs on the elevator, and he sat in the corner of our room waiting for a name.
“Jeremiah?” said my mother.
“Like the bullfrog?” I asked, at the same time my mother clarified “like the prophet.”
My mother paused.
Jeremiah was a gi-raffe, she sang, because in the right circumstances a joyful thing can be any or all of the things you need it to be.
*
My mother wasn’t the only one who wanted Jeremiah to be a prophet. Allegedly, Jeremiah was a prophet was meant to be the first line of the song, but everyone hated it, so the bullfrog went in as a temporary fix to hold the melody and made himself at home. The song was originally conceived as part of a series for children that never aired and repurposed for adults when Axton teamed up with Three Dog Night, the description of the program makes it seem somewhat likely that the bullfrog may have been there all along, right at home in a child’s fantasy land, though perhaps without his wine. People trying to interpret the song have looked for the prophet, for an underlying religious meaning, but the band says sometimes a bullfrog is just a bullfrog. As for the prophet Jeremiah, he was tasked to prophecy the destruction of the kingdom, which did not make him many friends; driven into exile and later imprisoned, he wrestled with his faith but clung to it in the end. Much of Jeremiah, the longest book of the Bible [1], is a chronicle of despair. For example:
You have deceived me, O LORD, and I was deceived. You have overcome me and prevailed. I am a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I cry out, I proclaim violence and destruction.
*
I never asked my mother why she wanted to name the giraffe after Jeremiah the prophet. By the time she was sick I had not been religious in many years, but I didn’t remember Jeremiah having particular significance back in the days when church was something we shared. In the face of her resilient faith, I often felt like the prophet of doom, the person who had to be logistically and emotionally prepared for what would happen next every time we didn’t get our miracle. But perhaps my mother identified with Jeremiah, with the feeling of being exiled from your life in spite of your faith, or perhaps he just seemed like the kind of prophet you might need in a hospital, one whose open doubts and sadness didn’t undo his truth. It is too late to ask her; my mother died two and a half years ago, in a different hospital, after a terrible few years, but not before we wrestled that giraffe in the backseat of the car and rode four hours back to her house with him, not before my mother, some months later, took him to the UPS store where they shipped him in two taped together boxes and he arrived in my office on my birthday, wearing a ribbon around his neck, and not a single person asked what I, a 30-something professor, needed a giant giraffe for, I’d like to think because his purpose was clear.
*
I cannot tell the future and I cannot tell you exactly what the song means, but I can tell you this—the fleeting joy of holding on to something when you know you’re going to have to let it go is a joy that I believe in. My religious faith has been gone a long time, my faith in humanity wavers, but my faith in fully committing to the moments of real joy the universe lets you have, to the joy that looming destruction can’t take, is still here. I cannot tell you whether this song is “good”, but I can tell you it is damn delightful, that it may be absurd but so is everything that brings us joy when despair makes sense, and if you disagree that’s fine and you may feel free to go chase your own fleeting joys and hold them close, but you may not help me drink my wine.
[1] by word count, in the original Hebrew. Some sources use number of chapters, which makes Psalms the longest.
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for Fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and American Short Fiction, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. Her second collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.