September 20, 2007

Genesis is Back, Striking a Blow for What’s Real and Uncool

If you’re one of the tragically unhip – and you know who you are – your day has come.

Genesis is back. And everyone who was never quite cool enough, trendy enough or popular enough can raise a fist in triumph.

We live in an age in which our music stars are as invented and manufactured as our politicians. Britney Spears did not toil for years in clubs, you know. She was the product of marketing professionals who are now, even as we speak, manufacturing the next one.

Whether in entertainment, politics or even sports, we can hardly be sure if anything is what it appears to be. Did Barry Bonds really hit all those home runs on the up and up? Were the Patriots using video cameras to cheat? How convincingly did Britney lip-synch? (Not very.) You see those big faces Hillary makes? Who buys that?

If you’re not sure what’s real, your safest bet will be on nothing. Or it was – until Genesis came back.

I love Genesis. No, you don’t understand. I love Genesis. The amazing music is enough for them to earn and keep my love, but they give me more. Rising up in the late ‘60s, making a mark for themselves in the ‘70s, becoming monstrously huge in the ‘80s and early ‘90s – only to see their star decline as real music became an anachronism – Genesis was always the band you could love without worrying that they would take advantage of you and leave you in the morning.

Other stars of their era made headlines with drug abuse, sex scandals, violence and rivalries. And death. It was far more interesting to read about the bitterness within The Police, the debauchery of the Rolling Stones, the haze of Jimi Hendrix, the suicide of Kurt Cobain.

Those who wanted to identify with the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle on the edge hated Genesis. They offered nothing to the cool crowd. Guitarist Mike Rutherford played polo. Keyboard player Tony Banks rarely looked up from his gear while playing, and let it be known that he enjoyed driving his Volkswagen Bus in the country with his wife. Drummer/vocalist Phil Collins looked like a Cabbage Patch kid.

Oh, and they rocked. Yes, I know, they had ballads (real ones, not the “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” kind, lunkheads), but when they went for it, it was the most intense, amazing thing to witness. Banks’s fingers flew across the keyboard like an F-18 locked in on multiple targets. Collins attacked snare, bass and cymbals with a combination of rhythm and ferocity unmatched by any contemporary. Rutherford’s thumping bass or his sweet guitar melodies lived on in your mind all night.

It certainly wasn’t Eddie Van Halen tearing down the town. There were plenty of bands who could do that. A soaring Genesis piece had all the heart and more, but it was never designed to blow the listener away. It was designed to make you feel part of it, like they wrote it for you.

Genesis made it OK to like rock music if you didn’t care for musicians trying to act like bad asses all the time. They offered a home for those didn’t care for the drug use, the counterculture attitude or the pretentiousness of it all. For those who were perfectly happy to just love the music.

When they announced late last year that they would tour Europe and North America for the first time in 15 years, you couldn’t help but wonder if it could work in 2007. Genesis was uncool even in their heyday. How would they be received today, in an age when the music is almost incidental to the spectacle and the marketing of everything and anything accompanying it – often including the violence?

How about three sold-out nights in Philadelphia? How about a waiting throng at Giants Stadium?

This Genesis fan couldn’t wait. The first show of the North American leg was at Toronto’s BMO Field on September 7. With tickets in hand and my seven-year-old son in tow – the child has exceptional taste – we arrived two hours early, bravely waited out the rain and soaked in an unmistakable feeling of happiness.

Darkness fell, the wait finally ended and BOOM! The opening bars of “Behind the Lines” announced that for at least a few hours, it would be cool to be uncool and mandatory to be happy.

I think this portends something good, something needed. If we’re ready to once again embrace something so unpretentious, untrendy and just really, really good – it might mean we’re ready to take a step back and come to terms with a lot of things that are true and real. Maybe we won’t hitch our wagons quite so willingly to the slick and the focus-group-tested.

The last song of the night, “Carpet Crawlers,” is both slow and intense. If you don’t get it, I can’t make you understand. But as you live in your uppity hip world, I have no need to visit you there. All the cool I need just came off stage, and I, like America, I think, am good again.