The one accolade Phil Collins will remember forever: “Take to my grave”
There are more than a few accolades that Phil Collins has received over the years that most people would kill for.
Anyone could have dreamed of being onstage at the Grammys and seeing one of their songs win, but the fact that he has managed to contribute his tunes to Genesis, his solo career, the Disney giant, and even Broadway is still one of the trifectas that almost feels too out of reach for some people. But Collins knew that the places where it mattered the most for him came from everyone that was still willing to buy his records.
That is, in the age of actually buying records. Even though the biggest names in rock and roll have adapted to the streaming world a lot easier, Collins’s shelf life as an all-time great will forever come from what he did when he was notching up hits. No one could touch him in the 1980s, and yet the reason why his songs still endure is because the melodies are simply better than most people were willing to churn out around that time.
No one could deliver a song with such melodrama as ‘Against All Odds’, and even if the songs were more than a little bit saccharine for the prog-rock crowd, that didn’t matter to Collins so long as he was able to do what he wanted. Because as much as people like to think that he was selling out around this time, Collins did seem genuinely interested in making the music that he wanted to make whenever he turned to the pop world.
He seemed to like the idea of redoing a version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ back in the day, but even when he turned towards children’s entertainment in the 1990s, he managed to surpass 100 million records all on his own. No one would have managed to reach that height if they tried, and while Collins didn’t have the same magnetism as someone like Michael Jackson, he was sharing the same kind of accolades that the ‘King of Pop’ did back in the day.
His tunes were everywhere back in the day, but the fact that he was able to cross that sales threshold was the kind of accomplishment that he wouldn’t trade for the world, saying, “Me, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney are the only people who’ve ever sold 100 million records solo, and 100 million records with their previous band. That’s something I will take to my grave.” Then again, that might also be half the reason why someone people dislike Collins so much as well.
When you’ve been in the public eye for that long, most people aren’t thinking about the backlash, and Collins was in for a clobbering when he eventually stopped making music. The rest of the world had frankly had enough of him, and when Noel Gallagher became one of the single coolest artists on the planet, his disdain for Collins’s music meant that the Genesis frontman was in for an uphill battle to get on the good side of the youth all over again.
It didn’t always work, and even Collins said that he had had enough after one too many tries to get back in everyone’s good graces, but that doesn’t mean that every generation feels that way. Collins’s love for the R&B world is still the reason why people like Pharrell consider some of his records untouchable, and the fact that he could make tunes with Philip Bailey and sing the hook of ‘Take Me Home’ over a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony beat is still an accomplished in itself.
So while many people like to talk about how Collins is the worst thing to happen to pop music and a scourge upon the 1980s, the numbers don’t lie. His music was what made everyone feel great whenever he sang, and even if people can’t stand ‘Sussudio’ or ‘Another Day in Paradise’, Collins was doing everything he could to make sure that he could go down in history like his musical heroes.
