Phil Collins, the grimacing Yoda of 80s git-rock, is to release a new album next month. Roll up your jacket sleeves, people, because if that isn’t exciting enough, it’s full of soul and Motown covers. “I want the songs to sound exactly like the originals,” he declares, and surely an album that sounds exactly like a bunch of old soul and Motown songs is a more enticing prospect than an album that sounds exactly like Phil Collins singing a bunch of old soul and Motown songs. Apart from all those received ideas about authenticity and credibility and the sanctity of ‘the original’, Phil’s statement opens up plenty of exciting philosophical rat-runs: will his new album be a Baudrillardian simulacrum of the originals, concealing and perverting their essence, their reality; or perhaps a Borgesian map, on a 1:1 scale to the musical territory it depicts?Or will it sound like Phil Collins singing a bunch of old soul and Motown songs?
14 comments:
Will the video show Phil shuffling along on a Zimmer singing "You can't hurry, Love"?
The cool-hot cycle is more of a 3D globe structure where you can go so far into the naff region that you emerge back into cool. I cite Rolf Harris, Tom Jones and possibly rap-revered Phil.
Phil Collins, author of the Motown.
Serious question: why is Phil Collins so widely despised? OK, he's not everybody's cup of tea, but surely his stuff is no more or less objectionable than anything else of its time. What is it about him that generates so much ire?
Never quite got the Phil-as-hip-hop-icon thing, Rog. Apart from samples of his drumming from the chocolate advert, of course.
Very good, Billy.
It's his chippy irritation about not getting his critical dues, LC. Whereas Tom Jones (see Rog's comment) never really gave a toss, and was therefore admitted into the canon. The flipside of not wanting to be in a club that would have you as a member.
I don't care what it sounds like, as I shall not be listening.
I blame his whiny self-obsession, LC. That and putting closeups of his face on his album covers. Or maybe those are the same things.
I do think it's the cover to No Jacket Required that first made me want to kill him.
Doesn't everybody mostly hate him because of that patronising song about the homeless?
I can only say "STOP in the name of love ... think it oh, ver, ver!"
I thought it was because he left his wife by fax. So many reasons, really.
At least the self-absorbed old ham has the good taste to live in tax exile in Switzerland.
As a drummer he had his moments....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmP8NC2EOLE
Noodle, noodle....
Nice.
Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh etc. Eat your heart out Keith Moon.
Was the wife he left by fax the one who did a naked calendar in aid of a endangered habitat in Washington State? Or was that the other one?
Not sure who is dumber, the blog owner or the goons who follow it. I guess you meant "perceived" instead of received? PC has more talent in one of his arse hairs, than you will attain in a lifetime.
No, I meant received, as in "received wisdom". Do try to keep up. By the way, do you like Huey Lewis and the News as well?
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