Genesis’ “I Can’t Dance”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #7 in March 1992.
Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.
We know “they” can’t dance. Writing a song about an incontestable fact reminds me of student reporters who after writing “Christopher Columbus landed on San Salvador in October 1492” add “according to Wikipedia.” Or I may be mistaken. Maybe Mike Rutherford is Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing, cuckolding septuagenarian gamblers by day and rockin’ the shack to Solomon Burke by night.
Released in the chillness of a 1992 winter, “I Can’t Dance” took advantage of the continued receptiveness of Top 40 stations to old people recording pop songs. Because Phil Collins led this trio of old people, Genesis got a special pass. Invisible Touch had been a barnstormer: five consecutive top five singles, proving the truth of what colleague Al Shipley claim for the album as the bald man’s Thriller. The subsequent success of the Buster soundtrack singles and Collins’ solo 1989 …But Seriously suggested a string of Collins-fronted hits extending into 2008.
This will not be an entry in which I explain, never mind defend, my affection for Phil Collins. I’ve done it already. His best material, steeped in R&B as much as client John Martyn, needs no defense in 2017. But “I Can’t Dance” leaves defenders no choice but to expose themselves to slings and arrows, like a political party in an off-year election. The riff, Mike Rutherford’s inspiration after taking to the Levi Strauss & Co. ad using the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” is a dollop of mashed potatoes. The updated Ennio Morricone rhythm is a pastiche in search of a reason for existing. The clenched-larynx way in which Collins holds “I-I-I-I-I” in the chorus is an irritant as gross as Donald Trump repeating “wonderful” in a non-sentence. The MH-HM inserted by Collins in the middle eight is a belch. I won’t address the video except to say that it’s the nerds in David Lee Roth’s “California Girls” exacting their revenge.
When We Can’t Dance dropped in the late fall of 1991, the climate had changed as imperceptibly as a seismographic reading in Seattle from a tremor in Japan. Genesis was up to dealing with Michael Jackson and U2, even upstarts like R.E.M. and Guns N Roses; but the cultural shift wrought by Nirvana coincided with a gradual realization that VH-1 was the best place for men over thirty-five, not Y-100 or Power 95, certainly not MTV. I will insist that Nirvana’s influence on the pop chart has been overstated: hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced singles aside, 1992’s biggest hits could have charted a year earlier. But visually it simply would not do to have videos in which English dudes in floppy shirts and execrable non-hair poke mild fun of themselves on a beach. Which is to say that MTV played the hell out of “I Can’t Dance,” the album’s only top ten, but programmers must have looked nervously at their audience response data. For the next two years Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Red Hot Chili Peppers sandwiched around TLC, Janet Jackson, and yet another The Chronic single were the (immediate) future.
The shelf life of “I Can’t Dance” was shorter than for organic cream. The album’s two other top fifteen singles dominated adult contemporary airplay for years. In the summer before my freshman year of college, three songs got insistent airplay at Miami Subs: Howard Jones’ “No One is to Blame,” Taylor-Dayne-as-a-Christian Kathy Trocoli’s forgotten “Everything Changes,” and Genesis’ “Hold On My Heart.” The latter, We Can’t Dance‘s third single, proved its most enduring staple: a ballad in which no one involved feels a thing, not even the drum programmer. Even worse was “Jesus He Knows Me,” a song that said as much about religious fundamentalism as “Illegal Alien” did about border control. In 1983, MTV would have played the clip to death, thus ensuring its place in Worst Songs Ever lists; in 1992 it was a dog’s water dish, left on a stoop and ignored.
Yet We Can’t Dance reaffirmed Genesis’ formidable sales clout. Get this stat: every Genesis album through We Can’t Dance outsold its predecessor in England, an unsurpassed record. In America, despite one top ten single, the album eventually sold four million copies in a 72-week chart stay, the band’s second-biggest album — the last gasp of Phil Collins’ remarkable ten-year chart omnipresence. Confusing indefatigability with taking a breath, he released Both Sides less than a year after “Never a Time” fell off the chart. The decline was ominous: he hung on by a thread in England, but only “Everyday” took in America, and no one thought it was as tuneful as “Do You Remember.” The hiccup like Eric Clapton and any Stones release excepted, MTV had locked its gates against the boomers (Peter Gabriel, with his usual canniness, let MTV run with “Digging in the Dirt” and “Steam” before dropping off the face of the earth for a decade).
So the hot sun beat down on Collins, Rutherford, and keyboardist Tony Banks, seared ceaselessly into the past.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
An eloquent entry about a horrible, horrible song. You’ve also reminded me that although I listened over and over to Invisible Touch (the album) on cassette, unlawfully dubbed from the library’s copy, I never ended up buying the legitimate release (either on cassette or CD) as I did with so much other childhood pirate booty. I genuinely enjoyed it, from the hits to the weird apocalyptic album tracks, but maybe by the time I started buying cassettes it seemed just too uncool to buy a Genesis album, as opposed to, say, Forever Your Girl (!!). Maybe songs like “I Can’t Dance” were why.
It’s odd, really – a lot of the things that fascinate me about Genesis, such as the similarity between Collins’ antipathy to his much posher bandmates and Thatcherism’s antipathy to the traditional Right, don’t really have any meaning or import in the United States: the music of their commercial peak there is much more straight-down-the-line pop without social or political inferences.
At much the same time you had people like Robyn Hitchcock exploiting, very successfully, the way American liberals didn’t see the vision of England put through in his music as tainted with Right-wing politics in the way their co-thinkers in England itself did (I specifically heard RH say this once on BBC radio, and it remains a profound gap between the English & American Lefts; when I see Scott Seward’s ILM posts it is blatantly obvious to me that he doesn’t really recognise or accept grime because he cannot really imagine that such people live in England at all because he hasn’t seen them on PBS, and he *doesn’t get the political inferences of this*). But as far as the mass American audience was concerned, this embrace of Thatcherism by one man from the background that most enthused about it and two others from the background that grudgingly accepted it as an escape from socialism was the biggest, most potent face of the Atlantic alliance. The band’s early albums, amassed with the sort of Englishness that sells best abroad to a miniscule cult audience aligned to the Left in their own countries but the Right in England itself, weren’t really a much bigger cult in early 1970s America than Robyn Hitchcock was in late 1980s America (or, on a similar tip, And Also the Trees in late 1980s Germany or the Would-Be-Goods in late 1980s Japan) – compared to the vast scale and bombast of their contemporaries (even those such as Jethro Tull who played up to similar imagery), this quieter, folkier music had no chance on American rock radio, it was too understated just as pre-DSOTM Floyd was too weird.
So the fact that Genesis only became an international success as they played down their Englishness isn’t as predictable as it might appear; others have been helped abroad *by those very qualities*. But not to sell multiple millions and achieve MTV saturation. That wouldn’t have been possible without pissing off the Anglophiles, the equivalent of Guardianistas in their own land but whose visions are so easily confused with those of the Mail & Telegraph in the land to which they aspire …
“But as far as the mass American audience was concerned, this embrace of Thatcherism by one man from the background that most enthused about it and two others from the background that grudgingly accepted it as an escape from socialism was the biggest, most potent face of the Atlantic alliance.”
Are your referring to Genesis and members of Genesis?
Yes, yes I am.
Into which category does Collins fall?
Excellent post, by the way.
He was from the background most enthused about it. The other two were from the privileged background who supported the anti-socialist ideas but thought aspects of it were a bit too vulgar and brash. Collins always seemed to feel that his posher cohorts were too white, had no sense of rhythm – classic class conflicts in the UK which may not have meant so much to their US audience.
re. Howard Jones, as that was presumably 1992 do you mean “Lift Me Up”, his last US Top 40 long after he ceased to be capable of such things in his home country?
Interesting to see Scott in that ILM thread you revived – his favourite Genesis song (“Entangled”) capturing them at their most stately, funkless, almost mediaeval*, overseas Anglophile-friendly, their most afraid either to rock or to pop. Proves my point, I reckon – it’s statelier and more polite than their earlier work which has a similar mediaeval air because it doesn’t have the more manic, edgier persona of Peter Gabriel, it’s like they were putting petals in their ears next to what the class of people dominating the band at that time would have regarded as the Somme of the trade unions. My suspicion is that ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ is less popular with US Anglophiles because it goes against what they want such a band to be, but more popular with the regular album-rock/classic-rock audience there than their other work of that period because it aspires to throw that stuff off, just in a very different direction from where they went later, and plugs into the mythology of US rock culture in a manner which has probably only been so surprising, so much a break from expectations, from one major British band since – Blur’s 1997 self-titled album.
*And yes, I am aware of how spelling it this way makes me sound, too …
The bits about “mashed potatoes” and “a dog’s water dish” had me laughing my ass off. Great writing as per usual.
Thank you for reading.