Phil Collins - No Jacket Required

No jackets required, but parachute pants are.

What you need to know up front about my relationship with Phil Collins is that it was predicated on my love for Miami Vice. In 1984 my family moved from the suburbs of Austin to a rural locale which opened doors for my formative years that may well have remained shut and locked otherwise. You see, before the move, we were heavily involved in the cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses for several years, and due in large part to that extreme fundamentalism, pop music and much of prime time television was verboten, to a point where I wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio, and for the last couple of years before the move we had no t.v. set. I was eleven at the time, and if you know how awkward it is for any kid to change schools mid-year, try being the kid with absolutely zero pop culture grounding; that was me. 

But with the move, the reins loosened. I couldn’t help being exposed to pop music even before the move, but now my daily bus ride to and from school was dominated by Top 40 radio played by our bus driver. The difference now was, if I heard something I liked, I felt free enough to try to explore it. My brother, sister and I certainly tested the waters gingerly and gradually with my still strict father, but we still somehow managed very quickly to get up to speed.

Sometime not long after we’d arrived, a promo for a new television show started playing non-stop on NBC: Scene, nighttime on the streets of Miami, flashes of a single sports car wheel and fender, then looking top down on the hood as the car rolled along, set to the soundtrack of electric drums and a single guitar chord splashed and sustained, until a huge, reverberating drum fill and the car sped off into the night and the interstitial read “Miami Vice - Coming this Fall to NBC, Fridays at 10pm/9 Central” and wham! What the hell is this!? And oh my God, what was that song!? I searched everywhere for that song (okay, choices were limited when it came to researching music, or anything else for that matter, in 1984). I came up blank for a long time until autumn drew closer and the song began to spring up on the radio. It was “In the Air Tonight” by some guy named Phil Collins, and it wasn’t even a new song either. Turns out it came out in 1981. I had to get this cassette! And I did!

And it sucked. None of the other songs on Phil Collins' Face Value sounded anything at all like “In the Air Tonight.” I was disappointed as an understatement, but I pressed on believing there was greatness to be found here, on this, my first and so far only album I owned. 

Luckily my persistence of thought paid off in February, 1985. By that time Miami Vice was months into its first season, Phil Collins was a household name, and his third solo album, No Jacket Required was released, which featured  not one, but two songs that would end up soundtracking scenes in Miami Vice. I rushed out to get Jacket and boy was I not disappointed! It was everything I expected a Phil Collins album to be, drenched in gated reverb, and smacking of just enough of that 1980’s cotton candy smelling paranoia (ie Who Can It Be Now»Somebody’s Watching Me»Eyes of a Stranger»Billy Don’t Lose My Number). “One More Night” is the best ballad of the 1980s and I slowly danced to it with my girlfriend Deni at one middle school dance in the 6th grade, and my parachute pants weren’t quite enough to hide my excitement… There’s not a bad track on Jacket, even if the extra track tacked on to the end of the CD, “We Said Hello Goodbye”, sounded more Face Value than Jacket, and besides, CD players were too expensive for most people at the time to even know that song was on the album.

When an artist becomes ubiquitous or synonymous with a style and era, there’s no way to avoid the eventual backlash. It’s like the rubber band effect in Mario Kart that keeps snapping you back so you don’t get too far ahead of the pack: You may be successful, but just know that you suck a little more than you think you do. Phil Collins is now relegated to pretty much an adjective for bad pop. That way of thinking nearly got upended by influential indie-pop bands when people like members of Oneohtrix Point Never started name dropping him, but the damage had been done. I contend that for those of us who were there, if it wasn’t your thing then, you dislike it as much or more now, and if you weren’t there, and you weren’t party to the oversaturation Phil Collins' success bred, well tolerance for this kind of overproduced, dated schlock is limited at best. But for me, this is the pinnacle of pop and despite imprinting on my psyche at just the right moment of my life where circumstances were ripe to fully embrace it, I dunno, 12 times platinum sales in the US and 6 times platinum sales in the UK certainly means I wasn’t alone in my adoration of this album.