Phil Collins “No Jacket Required”
You’re upset. This isn’t right. This is the very definition of peak work. What is it doing as a past prime text? This is a Grammy winning, multi-platinum mega smash -- one of the greatest selling albums of all time. When this came out Phil Collins was popular music. Within the span of months, the chart-busting singles “Against All Odds” and “Easy Lover” shared the radio with “No Jacket Required”s” four hit offerings. If you turned on the TV, he was on Miami Vice. If you went to see “White Nights,” at the movies, Phil is singing “Separate Lives” on the soundtrack. You’re feeling bad about starving kids? Phil winks at you from behind on the drums on the Band-Aid charity single “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” He’s got this. He’s not done yet folks. Now he’s singing for a charity mega smash unprecedented – Live-Aid. Two all-star stadium shows: one in America, one in the UK. Phil kills it at Wembley. Time to rest on some laurels? No. Immediately after getting off the stage, Phil hops on the Concorde supersonic jet and crosses the Atlantic so he can make the curtain for the JFK stadium Live Aid show. The last hungry child gets a Pepsi. We did it. And yet, time looks back at this album and something seems strange.
It was 2020. I was driving my car and listening to the radio. The familiar intro to Tom Cochrane’s 1992 hit “Life is A Highway” made my soul drop. Ugh. Why didn’t this song go away? Who decided to keep this around? Suddenly, I had a thought. I pulled the car onto the shoulder and turned the radio off so I could think. When was the last time I heard “Sussudio?” I sat on the shoulder for two hours. I couldn’t remember. Years, I think, maybe decades? “Sussudio” was one of two #1 hits off of Phil Collins’ “No Jacket Required.” It was the ubiquitous companion to 1985. What had happened to it?
It took me a long time to figure this out; hours of work, heels to the pavement, going to door to door, a real ground game; but also some hi-tech shit: computer modeling data, 3D imaging, back issues of People magazine on microfiche...the works. I developed a theory. It involves a truth uncovered by a much-reviled conglomerate.
Clear Channel is the name for the company that controls what we hear on the radio. They actually rebranded and call themselves iheartmedia now. Probably because everyone hates them though it’s possible they really do heart media. Years ago, Clear Channel dispensed with DJ’s and replaced them with algorithms that are very precise and accurate about what the public really want to hear. You may think that some music aesthete decided that “Sussudio” wasn’t as cool as we thought it was in 1985, and took it off the list. That’s not how it works. Clear Channel is not run by individuals. Clear Channel uses the hive mind to guide its decisions. Tom Petty wrote an album called The Last DJ complaining about this, but in this case Clear Channel may have uncovered something I couldn’t figure out sitting on the side of the highway. What I saw through Clear Channel’s eyes was that as culture shifted over the decades, the hive collectively decided that “Sussudio” was actually a mistake, that its lab-cooked sound -- the live drums upon drum machine upon horn chart upon state-of-the-art programmed beats -- were all just too much. Usually the world has to wait for middle-aged men working out their own crises through blogging to uncover a misdiagnosed peak career album, but instead, a supercomputer in Clear Channel’s buried headquarters figured it out first. This, dear reader, explains why “Sussudio” has been eradicated from the airways.
At this point, I want to reveal that I like Phil Collins, and I really dug this album in fifth grade when it came out. As an unsolicited and unpaid music journalist, it would be a lot quicker and easier to tackle Phil when he went to work for Disney and wrote songs chronicling the inner life of Tarzan. But this album, the mass hypnotism it accomplished, and then its disappearance, mystified me. As I dug through Phil’s thoughts on the record, he says he wanted to break out of the ballad box he found himself in. He wanted to make an up-tempo record, something you could dance to. That motivation tracks both with the albums’ onslaught of rhythmic elements that insist you pay attention, and what you are left with at album’s end: a curious emptiness. It was an album that was designed to change Phil’s image. It was made for appearances. I put forth that his heart wasn’t really in it. This dodging of self is what makes it a retroactively past prime album.
Listening to “Sussudio” today really hurts your head. It’s simultaneously impressive and exhausting. Where did this sound come from? Despite its potential for putting him out of a job, Phil Collins was a drummer who was unafraid of the drum machine. He had been tinkering with an early model while he was in Genesis, but he made the sound immortal on his first solo album with “In the Air Tonight.” Phil said he liked the relentless quality it had. “In the Air Tonight” has a lot of space and atmosphere around that relentlessness, and the steady tick-tock of the machine is able to help conjure up a sense of some unavoidable encroaching doom. The famous explosive drum solo Phil pounds out at the song’s climax gets its power from the contrast to the tiny tick of the drum machine. As Collins goes after making a dance record, he removes the space around the mechanical elements and you’re left with only relentlessness. The Phoenix Horns, formerly on Earth, Wind, and Fire’s payroll, should add a touch of organic “feel” to the work, but their virtuoso speed and precision matches the machine instead, only increasing the unhinged drive of the music. There’s just no “feel” to any of this.
All the up-tempo numbers on “No Jacket Required” are successful at using the horns, drums and synths to ratchet up your nervous system. The accelerated tempo creates terror more than joy. It’s strange to think these songs were designed for dancing. “Only You Know or I Know,” “Don’t Lose My Number” and “Who Said I Would” have such a paranoia baked in, I can’t imagine a listener feeling safe enough in a crowd to shake a tailfeather. The dance-hall fright achieved is arresting, but it is not a sustainable state. Even when the lyrics have no sign of paranoia, like in the school-boy crush theme of “Sussudio,” the music’s mania won’t let you fully enjoy yourself. The slow numbers go down easier, especially “Long, Long Way to Go,” his first of multiple songs addressing first world vs. third world problems. The plea to the privileged is not nearly as nauseating as you’d think. There’s a great Sting backup vocal on it, and he is really good at creating atmosphere with spare loops of percussion and synth pads. It’s sort of his super power. The number one hit ballad, “One more Night,” seems pretty dull and half-cooked in hindsight. Maybe, in an unusual twist, the social consciousness was the more honest moment, and the love songs and dance floor material are the b.s.
Case closed.
But wait. Why now, why do we only figure this out now in 2020? Why were we different in 1985? As a drummer, Phil was uniquely positioned to take keyboards, horns, and programmed beats and turn it all into pulsing percussion to get us moving. A.S. (After Sussudio) Hip-Hop took the reins of beat based Pop and they did it better. Through today's Hip-Hop nursed ears, the 1985 number one hit that seemed exciting and new, seems aggressive and crazed. Collins, not an uptempo dance kind of guy in the first place, didn’t know how to make it swing. He just knew how to make it reflect his own middle-aged terror at not being boxed in as a ballad guy. Today, with the increased speed of a screen-based life altering our metabolism further, the forced quality of this music is even more upsetting to our fragile internal balance. Clear Channel sensed this from the data that monitors when we switch the radio station. Somewhere in the mid 90s people started turning away from “Sussudio,” so Clear Channel stopped feeding it to us. By 2020, “No Jacket Required” was completely gone and there was no way to even get it back in the system because the upbeat dance material on “No Jacket Required” had no existing genre to be programmed in. It wasn’t Classic Rock, it wasn’t Adult Contemporary and it definitely wasn’t Hip-Hop. Phil had the equivalent of a Skiffle record on his hands.
I had finally cracked the case. I got back in my car and peeled out in my Prius to go get a well earned treat from Starbucks. This work I was doing was giving meaning and direction to my own past prime period. I wondered if the movers and shakers on the town council were following my blog? I flipped on 94.7’s carefully controlled airwaves and “Sussudio” said hello. Shit. There goes my theory.