This is not the part where I fangirl my favourite Genesis songs of all time (spoiler: Eleventh Earl of Mar). Nor where I exhaustively analyze one of them for complexity in a fit of musicological craft (Rick Beato did this expertly in his Dance on a Volcano edition of What Makes This Song Great).
Neither is this entry a chronology of my lifelong love affair with a musical group. But for some punctual moments, it’s all a bit of a blur anyway.
Rather, I’m going to do exactly what I promised to do in the About section of this blog when I first launched it. I’m going to talk about why it matters so much. Except that this time my subject isn’t a minutes-long song, it’s a half-century personal story arc.
We’ve heard this a million times about the ‘uniqueness’ of a composer, a singer, an instrumentalist, a group of musicians: “no other artist sounds like them!” Indeed, that superlative has become so banal that it seems to have lost all meaning. Let me say this, though, in the face of not only all the artists whom that phrase has been attached to and the sheer number of times it’s been uttered: No one, absolutely no one, not before, not at the time, nor since, ever sounded anything like Genesis. Their music and its rendering defied not only genre-assignment, but even a set of terms to analyze it and a model to liken it to. To this day, the language leaves me to describe their outré, exhilarating, sometimes terrifying sounds and musical stories. They were a law unto themselves.
What this meant to me was immeasurable. They weren’t just an interest or a hero or even a passion. Their animated, perfectly impossible world and the sounds that filled it became a way forward for me.
Genesis couldn’t find the forms to speak their truth, so they created them. They couldn’t find the instruments to make the grand sounds they heard in their heads, so they synthesized theirs to form the necessary timbres. That’s why you can’t tell the guitars and keyboards apart (or that they’re even guitars and keyboards at all).
From this, I simply never accepted that ‘it is what it is’. I became resourceful and paid less attention to what things were designed to do and more to what they were able to do. This served me well in DIY home reno’s and my digital publishing career.
I made up phrases and expressions. Most of them were goofy and didn’t always get my point across very effectively, but over time, I got better at it and became an expressive and engaging partner, colleague, buddy and speaker. A couple of my euphemisms have caught on.
I started to believe less in perfection and more in beauty – the former has an end, the latter is infinite. I’ve fallen in love countless times in my life, most of those times with no one or nothing in particular. And because of that, I almost never feel lonely.
I started to believe in, and insist on, excellence as maxim, not just here and there, but every damn time. But I’m unworshipping of my own accomplishments (if not everyone else’s). I believe in continuing education and self-improvement and I consider everything I do unfinished (I change these very posts multiple times after they’re published, sometimes even months later). This has made me very demanding – in a positive way – of people around me, and most of all, of myself. My career has been very successful.
Steve was 25, Mike, Tony and Phil 24 when they set to work on A Trick of the Tail. Pete, their centrepiece, their voice, their very brand itself, was gone. They had no plan; only purpose, unrequited dreams and a blank canvas. They were kids, they had no bloody idea what they were doing… and they made something that was absolutely perfect. Of course, I never learned about their creative process until years later, but for me that backstory became part of their music, as compelling as the sounds themselves.
And so in all aspects of my life, I’ve restlessly reinvented myself – happy for my learnings, but never satisfied that the the n.0 version of myself was the last, the best, or even what the people around me deserved. I’m still hard at work on those things. They’re the foundation of my strength, my faith, my happiness and my fidelity to loved ones, commitments and pursuits.
The realization has dawned on me that I’m just another chapter in the creative story that my favourite collective of musicians – Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Ant Phillips and Mike Rutherford – have contributed to. I could never have found success where they succeeded, we each have our calling; but I feel so grateful that I’ve found my place in a continuum that they furnished with such inspiration.
That’s what I took from these six creators and a $4 purchase.
