The classic Genesis song that the audience “killed” by not getting the joke
“When we write, we don’t think about our audience,” Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks confessed in 1992, “When we finish, it’s sort of a shock to realise that other people are now going to hear this and judge this.”
Back in the ‘80s, when the members of Genesis were still relatively young, the odds were good that the intent of their music would connect, through the zeitgeist, with the average radio listener. As the ‘90s began, however, it was a bit harder to tell where Genesis fit in amongst the competing trends of boy bands, grunge rock, house music, and Garth Brooks. Would the audiences who lapped up ‘Invisible Touch’ and ‘In Too Deep’ still be on board to hear what these 40-something blokes had to say?
The answer was an enthusiastic ‘Yes’, just with a small caveat: Genesis’s 1991 album We Can’t Dance was a number one record in the UK and of the biggest selling releases of that year worldwide, moving more units than several ‘91 classics, including REM’s Out of Time, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and even MC Hammer’s 2 Legit 2 Quit. The album’s breakout single, however, ‘I Can’t Dance’, didn’t really land the way the band had hoped.
Undercut by a very goofy music video, in which Phil Collins appears to be mocking himself as an uncoordinated old man before briefly breaking into a full Michael Jackson gyration impersonation, the song was essentially received as light comedy.
When they wrote ‘I Can’t Dance,’ though, Collins and his bandmates were thinking a bit more high-brow and satirical, taking aim at the same sort of ‘sell-out’ culture that the grunge guys were rebelling against, which was the commercialisation of everything and the proliferation of supermodels selling overpriced blue jeans: “No, I can’t dance, I can’t talk / The only thing about me is the way I walk / No, I can’t dance, I can’t sing / I’m just standin’ here sellin’ everything”.
“It’s not about being unable to dance,” Collins explained to Rolling Stone, “It’s about guys that look good but can’t string a sentence together. Each verse is a piss-take at the scenario of a jeans commercial. It was good fun, but the audience thought, ‘What does he mean that he can’t dance?’ They didn’t see the humour, and it killed the fun.”
To be fair to the audience, seeing Collins, Banks, and guitarist Mike Rutherford doing their version of the Ministry of Silly Walks in the video for the song didn’t necessarily scream social satire, nor had they put ages of effort into crafting ‘I Can’t Dance’ in the first place.
Banks admitted that the song was atypical of the band to make, explaining, “Mike had this basic riff which he played, and we worked it into a 16-bar riff… I started playing drums on this thing [a sampler], and that gave it a completely different feel. It suddenly had an edge of humour in it, and Phil started singing in this kind of high voice, giving it instant character.” They decided then that working on it further would only distort the idea, which is why it was done in a “few hours”.
“It shows a certain direction we could go in for certain songs, which is totally the opposite of what Genesis used to do in the past, which was to overblow a thing; take one idea and make it massive. This was taking an idea and leaving it really small and making it work,” he further added, but then, all this nuance was lost on the listeners.
