This analysis looks at how Genesis and their singers portray poverty and Africa in their songs. Is the portrayal appropriate or is it full of clichés and prejudices? And did these songs do anything to help the poor or were they merely there for commercial success and artistic pleasure? For that, I will give a short biography of the band, and then I will select some songs and see how the band Genesis has dealt with the topic of poverty in their music.
The representation of poverty or of poverty in Africa has always been a big topic in popular music, especially combined with the idea of fighting poverty or helping the poor people in Africa. One of the most famous examples is probably the Live Aid concert in 1985. It was the continuation of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" from 1984, in which musician Bob Geldof had gathered many famous pop stars to raise money for the poor starving population in Ethiopia. The concept worked and half a year later, the Live Aid performances were celebrated with the same intention. There were two parallel concerts, one in London, one in Philadelphia, and the whole 80s pop world seemed to participate in the event. One man stuck out: Genesis lead vocalist Phil Collins, who was at that time becoming increasingly famous with his solo career, was the only one who played on both concerts. This was made possible when he crossed the Atlantic with a Concorde. He made it into the Guinness Book, and helped Live Aid to become an even more memorable event.
Collins has done charity work throughout his whole career, and he wrote some outstanding songs that deal with the critical topic of homelessness or the apartheid. These include songs from his solo career as well as from his time with rock band Genesis. Genesis was founded in 1967 and included Peter Gabriel on vocals, Tony Banks on keyboards and Mike Rutherford on guitars. Later, Phil Collins joined them as a drummer, and when Gabriel left in 1975, he became the new lead singer. Genesis launched a successful career full of hits and chart-topping albums, and all its members had more or less successful solo careers. Especially Collins rose to stardom, but also former singer Peter Gabriel became a certified superstar. He too, like Collins, has done a lot of charity work and wrote a couple of songs that deal with the crises and catastrophes in the world.
Table of contents
Introduction
1 Genesis: a short biography
2 The representation of poverty in chosen songs by Genesis, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins
3 Conclusion
4 List of references
4.1 Primary Sources
4.2 Secondary Sources
1 Introduction
The representation of poverty or of poverty in Africa in particular has always been a big topic in popular music, especially combined with the idea of fighting poverty or helping the poor people in Africa. One of the most famous examples is probably the Live Aid concert in 1985. It was the continuation of the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ from 1984, in which musician Bob Geldof had gathered many famous pop stars to raise money for the poor starving population in Ethiopia. The concept worked and half a year later, the Live Aid performances were celebrated with the same intention. There were two parallel concerts, one in London, one in Philadelphia, and the whole 80’s pop world seemed to participate in the event. One man stuck out: Genesis lead vocalist Phil Collins, who was at that time becoming increasingly famous with his solo career, was the only one who played on both concerts. This was made possible when he crossed the Atlantic with a Concorde. He made it into the Guinness Book, and helped Live Aid to become an even more memorable event.
Collins has done charity work throughout his whole career and he wrote some outstanding songs that deal with the critical topic of homelessness or the apartheid. These include songs from his solo career as well as from his time with rock band Genesis. Genesis was founded in 1967 and included Peter Gabriel on vocals, Tony Banks on keyboards and Mike Rutherford on guitars. Later, Phil Collins joined them as a drummer, and when Gabriel left in 1975, he became the new lead singer. Genesis launched a successful career full of hits and chart-topping albums, and all its members had more or less successful solo careers. Especially Collins rose to stardom, but also former singer Peter Gabriel became a certified superstar. He too, like Collins, has done a lot of charity work and wrote a couple of songs that deal with the crises and catastrophes in the world.
In this term paper, I will take a look at how Genesis and their singers portray poverty and Africa in their songs. Is the portrayal appropriate or is it full of clichés and prejudices? And did these songs do anything to help the poor or were they merely there for commercial success and artistic pleasure? For that I will give a short biography of the band, and then I will select some songs and see how the band Genesis has dealt with the topic of poverty in their music.
2 Genesis: a short biography
We think of ourselves as songwriters who can do a bit of this, a bit of that…whereas other people think of us as Genesis, this sacred cow which mustn’t do anything else, like a brand name. But really, it’s whatever we do (Phil Collins in Thompson 2005: 214).
Genesis was founded in 1967 by Peter Gabriel (vocals), Tony Banks (keyboards), Anthony Phillips (guitar) and Mike Rutherford (guitar and bass), when they were pupils at Charterhouse School, “a leading public school founded in 1611 on the site of a former ‘charterhouse’ (Carthusian monastery) in London, but in 1872 transferred to Surrey” (Room 1990: 64). In a time of The Beatles and ‘Swinging London’, the four chose music to try to break away from the unendurable private school routine. Their first record From Genesis to Revelation, which also gave the group its name, is full of bible references and in the fittingly titled song ‘In the Beginning’ Gabriel sings: ““It has begun – you are in the hands of destiny!” […] like some gleeful prophet” (Welch 2005: 16). The album and the band’s first single, “a Bee Gees-style effort called ‘The Silent Sun’ […] failed to get into the charts” (Welch 2005: 9), and after the next album Trespass (1970) Anthony Phillips quit the band.
They recruited two new members: Phil Collins on drums and Steve Hackett on guitar. Collins was from working-class. He had previously played in various bands, had a Grammar School and Stage School background and therefore a very different one to the other members of the band. Collins was one of many who answered their ad for a drummer and when he arrived at Peter Gabriel’s house he was advised to “have a swim in the private swimming pool”, while “the band tried out a couple of other drummers first.” He listened to their attempts and afterwards, as Tony Banks says, “he played everything we gave him really perfectly” (Waller 1985: 27). Not only his musical talent was a breath of fresh air, but also his different background: Tony Banks (2007: 96) remembers one or the other “violent disagreement” between Gabriel and himself and Collins (2007: 96) understood “that the dynamic I was entering was far more fragile than I had anticipated; […] Slowly I found that my job became the diffuser of tension.”
With this line-up and their next two albums Nursery Cryme (1971) and Foxtrot (1972), they became one of the major bands of the relatively new genre of progressive rock. The band was “celebrated for dramatised, extended works like […] ‘The Musical Box’, ‘The Return Of the Giant Hogweed’, ‘Watcher Of The Skies’ and ‘Supper’s Ready’” (Welch 2005: 5). Front man Peter Gabriel became the focus of the band. He covered his shyness onstage, when one night he appeared “in a red dress and a fox’s head” like on the album cover of Foxtrot. In the following week “there was a picture of Pete in his fox’s head on the front page of the Melody Maker – which doubled our earnings straight away” (Collins in Fielder 1984: 61). The costumes became one of Gabriel’s trademarks in Genesis and he shaped the presentation of progressive rock music as well.
Their next album Selling England By The Pound (1973) included the short song ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’, which was “their first British hit” (Holm-Hudson 2008: 45), something they had aimed for since they had started. The song was moving on a different territory than their previous long, elaborate songs and led the band into new areas, which would lead to their sometimes criticized single success in the following decades. Still, Gabriel was dressing up for live performances, and the visual side of the show seemed to become more important by the time of their next album The Lamb Lies down on Broadway (1974). A wide range of costumes had been used up to that point: A “disturbing, malevolent old-man mask, […] a giant flower headpiece, […] a shining white suit”, which he wore while floating across the stage, or “a large set of bat wings” (Holm-Hudson 2008: 34). Now, on the tour for their new album, which was “a double concept LP” (Welch 2005: 35) with a “complicated, demanding story line, developed by Peter Gabriel” (Welch 2005: 34), he was for example wearing an outfit, which was “covering [him] head to toe in grotesque latex bumps” that “didn’t allow Gabriel’s vocals to be heard clearly, because the microphone was too far from his mouth” (Holm-Hudson 2008: 89). Tensions were running high within the group. Listening to Gabriel singing “Get me out of the cage!” on ‘In the Cage’ makes clear, that it was no surprise that he left the group after the tour. Soon after, “Gabriel launched a highly successful solo career” (Welch 2005: 36), with hits like Games without Frontiers or Sledgehammer, which made him more famous as a solo artist than in Genesis.
The band decided to move on and did not need to look for another lead vocalist for long: “the follow-up album A Trick of the Tail heralded the beginning of Genesis’s hugely successful period with Phil Collins as singer and charismatic front man” (Holm-Hudson 2008: 3). The standout tracks ‘Squonk’ and ‘Ripples’ show the wide range of Collins’s vocals. Steve Hackett (2007: 167) remembers that “both he and Pete had such similar and sympathetic voices that when they were singing together it sounded like doubletracking, wonderful harmonies on tunes like […] ‘I Know What I Like’.” Unlike Gabriel in his costumes, Collins approached a more down-to-earth performance, where he joked with the audiences and the band, or did a tambourine dance.
Still, after the release of their next record Wind and Wuthering (1976), guitarist Steve Hackett left the group, and the trio released the aptly-titled …and then there were three… (1978), which produced ‘Follow You Follow Me’, “their first UK Top Ten Hit” (Welch 2005: 50). For their touring band, Genesis had hired “American friends Chester Thompson (drums) and Daryl Stuermer (guitar)” (Welch 2005: 87). Live guitarist Daryl Stuermer remembers that “as soon as Genesis started having hit singles some old fans didn’t like it. You’d see them turning up their noses when Phil announced ‘Follow You Follow Me’. And I would think “Open up! Just because it’s sold well, doesn’t mean it’s a bad song”” (Fielder 1984: 107).
Success went on with the next album Duke (1980), “the band’s first number one UK album”, which included the two hits ‘Turn It on Again’, one of their trademark tunes and a stage favourite, and ‘Misunderstanding’, written by Phil Collins alone. Both of them were hits in America as well, and a year later Collins released his first solo record Face Value, including ‘In The Air Tonight’, “which reached #2 in Britain and #19 in the U.S.” and ‘I Missed Again’ “(U.K. #14, U.S. #19)”. Face Value “topped the UK charts and reached #7 in America” (Platts 2007: 116), making it “one of the most successful debut albums of the age – and Collins among the handful of artists, who, as the 1980s faded into the realm of nostalgia and oldies radio, came to epitomize the decade” (Thompson 2005: 184). It should be noted, that Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford also produced solo records. Whereas Banks was never that successful, Rutherford formed the group Mike and the Mechanics, which produced also a lot of hits (like The Living Years ) in the 1980s and 1990s.
Genesis released their next album Abacab in 1981 , with its title track being “a punching, throbbing, behemoth of a number”, which “packed a brutal electro enthusiasm that was absolutely in keeping with the harsher aspects of the so-called synthipop/New Romantic movement then holding Britain and, across the ocean, the fledging MTV in its thrall” (Thompson 2005: 189). Each album sold more than the one before and a number of hit albums and singles were waiting for Genesis in the next twelve years. Their next self-titled album (1983) included ‘Mama’, that “in a chart filled with Culture Club, Wham, Spandau Ballett and similar pop stuff, […] stood out a mile” (Bowler & Dray 1992: 188) and did not need to hide behind the Gabriel-era epics in terms of drama and stage presentation, and ‘That’s All’, “their first American Top Ten hit” (Welch 2005: 65).
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