GENESIS REUNION

The supergroup Genesis announced their reformation and subsequent tour at the beginning of the month. The trio of Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins are back after after thirteen years, but, unsurprisingly, original vocalist Peter Gabriel and influential guitarist Steve Hackett will be absent. Collins will delegate drumming responsibilities to his son Nicholas, as he can no longer drum himself due to spinal and nerve problems, and will perform solely in the role he has filled since the departure of Gabriel in 1975, that of lead singer. Even if Gabriel were to come back, which is very unlikely, there is no position for him to fill, as Collins can no longer revert back to drums. Hackett, on the other hand, can no longer fit into a band that has left him and his steadfast adhesion to prog rock behind, in favour of the more commercial pop of the Rutherford-Banks-Collins trio. The trio has, it has to be said, created some worthwhile catchy jingles, but let is not fool ourselves into thinking it is great art.

 

 

 

People often forget or are unaware of Genesis' prog rock early years. The radio plays the pop standards from the post-Gabriel period, which are catchy easy-listening fodder for the masses. This is what the trio of the current line up will be playing, because that is what has sold albums and filled stadiums, particularly in America. Collins often bears the blame for Genesis' shift in direction, but one only has to hear Mike Rutherford's Mike and the Mechanics project to realise the current trio were pulling in the same direction. Even to say things would be different with Gabriel still in the band is to ignore the more poppy direction his own solo career often took. It was really the departure of Hackett a year and two albums after Gabriel that allowed the total shift towards mainstream pop. In the first album of Rutherford-Banks-Collins And Then There Were Three, one clearly hears the intermediary between prog and pop. Prog Genesis was great art, but pop Genesis sells tickets. That tells much about the world we inhabit.

 

Prog Genesis are one of those paradoxes in English culture in that they owe much of their musicality and lyricism to the English liberal tradition, yet in being inculturated into that same liberalism, scorn the English tradition in favour of some distant Other of which and of whom they know little and can know little about. What do I mean by the liberal English tradition? I basically mean, in addition to the corrosive cosmopolitanism, the English folk tradition, but perverted against Nature, often with Nature's harshness and vitality sucked out in favour of Christian and post-Christian morality. Think of how faery tales were sanitised in the Victorian era and you have the idea. That is not to say that the sanitised faery tales had no artistic merit, but they were stripped of Eternal Truths in favour of comfort and easily-digested soul food for the easily triggered. Early Genesis have incredible artistic merit, but their world view is a false consciousness that is transmitted through some incredibly poetic lyrics which are simultaneously intellectual yet empty of any real meaning or profound truism. 

 

Then thrown into the mix is Peter Gabriel's extreme leftist SJW politics. The album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a case in point, a concept album that follows the trials and tribulations of a drug addicted post-racial half-Puerto Rican American held up as a new Jesus figure for the post-modern age. Freudian and post-Marxian themes abound, including the so-called sexual revolution, immasculation, sexual disease, deconstruction, schizophrenic transculturalism and so on. The album marked the end of the Peter Gabriel era and began the move towards mainstream pop away from their prog rock roots. Gabriel wrote the whole of the lyrics for Lamb, and it is clear that Gabriel's adherence to the prog rock genre was a convenience to enable him to preach from the pulpit. The Lamb is essentially a long parable, but he would equally come to embrace pop and world music to preach in songs like 'Games Without Frontiers' and 'Biko'. But there is no doubt that what Genesis really lost with the departure of Gabriel was poetic lyricism - that and the performance art of live shows that had all the hallmarks of the happenings popularised by the American Leftist street theatre groups of the period.

 

 

 

I suppose when one has a name like Peter Gabriel, Judeo-Christian myth is bound to feature in many of the lyrics, and here one does get one or two inklings of Truth. Not in the myth itself, of course, but in the discourse on the myth. I speak specifically of the epic Supper's Ready from Foxtrot. Although the lyrics are firmly from the Judeo-Christian perspective, the part known as 'Apocalypse in 9/8' reveals the true meaning of the Book of Revelation:

  

666 is no longer alone
He's getting out the marrow in your back bone
And the seven trumpets blowing sweet rock and roll
Gonna blow right down inside your soul
Pythagoras with the looking glass reflects the full moon
In blood, he's writing the lyrics of a brand new tune

 

The idea is that common notion that 'the devil has all the best music', meaning specifically the cry of many American conservative Christians that 'rock and roll is the music of the devil.' But who is the devil? Who is Satan, which in Hebrew means simply 'adversary'? The adversary of superstition is reason, and if Jesus has become 'the Word' (logos), as we are told in the beginning of the Book of Revelation, who did Jesus take the logos from? The answer is the Ancient Greek men of science like the cited Pythagoras, who held that the universe was shaped by learnable mathematical equations and which would give the key to the musica universalis. Pythagoras was instrumental in the development of scientific knowledge which had a religious dimension, particularly numerology. The Semitic tradition had taught that such knowledge was forbidden, of which Jesus of Nazareth was a part. As Tacitus observed, 'Christianity is a dangerous superstition', for it replaces reason with nonsense. In replacing the Ancient Greek scientific logos with superstitious mumbo-jumbo, Jesus became the first deconstructivist in the West, the Judaic tradition in any case, being one seeped in the deconstruction of other peoples, as I have mentioned before.

 

Of course, rock and roll needs science. The major difference between rock and roll and the previous musical forms is the harnessing of electricity, and this takes mathematical precision when constructing such equipment for the task. This is the real reason 'rock and roll be di music of di divil!' as Christians would have it. The Church of Rome has been notorious in its attempt at stamping on the return of science since the Renaissance, and with good 'reason': the return of true reason would mean the end of Christianity. This has come to pass to an extent; unfortunately, the so-called 'Age of Reason' brought with it the unreason of secular liberalism, which had again come from a compromise at coexistence with Christian morality, liberalism in the Anglosphere having, in any case, emerged from Calvinist Puritanism. This brings us back to Genesis' lyrics, and indeed over 99% of the lyrics of all pop and rock songs. They are the lyrical mouthings of liberal philosophy.

 

 

 

Some of the blame for Genesis' liberalism has to be laid at the door of Charterhouse School, founded by avaricious bourgeois civil servant Thomas Sutton, where Genesis was formed in January 1967 from the bands The Garden Wall and Anon by Gabriel, Rutherford, Banks, Anthony Phillips and Chris Stewart.  There they were discovered by convicted Jewish paedophile and Old Carthusian Jonathan King, who happened to be lurking at the school and who changed their name to Genesis in mid-1967. He had them replace their drummer and make trifling pop songs for their debut album From Genesis to Revelation. Ironically, they have ended their career as they began it. Don't get me wrong, pop standards like 'Follow You, Follow Me', 'Turn It On Again', 'Invisible Touch' and 'Jesus, He Knows Me' are still good songs, but most of the We Can't Dance album is pure garbage. The less said about Calling All Stations, sans Collins, the better. What marks post-prog Genesis albums is the blandness of the non-single tracks, and that can be said of most bands. Gone is the urge to experiment, and excellence is replaced by filler. 

 

For all that, there is no doubt that all members were exceptional musicians - and I mean especially Phil Collins. Whatever one might say about him as a man, one cannot ignore the fact he is among the first rank of drummers ever. The Collins of the early to mid-1970s delighted in creating complex rhythms to odd time signatures, which he would execute to perfection, complete with drum-fills, during live performances. Such tracks as the aforementioned 'Apocalypse in 9/8', 'Dance on a Volcano' and 'Watcher of the Skies' showcase his proficiency. He was matched in talent by Steve Hackett, who brought the double tapping technique to new fluid levels in 'Firth of Fifth', 'The Musical Box' and, yes again! 'Apocalypse in 9/8'. If I keep mentioning it, it is because Supper's Ready is outstanding as a piece of art. One cannot forget Rutherford and Banks' contribution either, nor Gabriel's vocals and his flute playing during earlier parts of Supper's Ready. Collins and Hackett could throw out a heavy solo better than most, as on 'The Return of Giant Hogweed'. One must also mention Anthony Phillips' contribution to Trespass and one can only wonder what a band with the guitar talents of both Phillips and Hackett would have been like.

 

In addition to this 'Last Domino?' tour by Genesis, Steve Hackett was already on the road with his 'Genesis Revisited' tour until the coronavirus struck, in which he plays songs from the prog era, as well as some of his solo work, which are also very much in the prog vein. Tickets for Genesis tend to range from £100 to £200, while Hackett's concerts will set you back a more modest £40 to £50. Personally, I'd rather just watch pre-Lamb Genesis on Youtube.