Of course, there are specks of truth and falsehood on all sides of the argument. These days, you speak ill of Phil at your own risk. How did this successful, gifted musician ever become such a whipping boy? Why were his treacly ballads and mild toe-tappers picked out as the ultimate symbols of consumerist vapidity? Was it just the cheap envy of older critics - so unlike today’s enlightened listeners, with our democratic embrace of pop that surgically strikes the pleasure centers of the masses? These windmill-tilting arguments have been trickling out steadily in recent years, following the lead of hip-hop tastemakers and Collins fanboys like Questlove and Kanye West. Lately, though, he’s been the subject of countless revisionist think pieces in which writers valorize his technical gifts as a drummer for the prog-rock pilgrims Genesis, emphasize his collaborations with Brian Eno, identify him as the secret patriarch of hip modern trends or express their incredulity that older generations ever denigrated the man’s output in the first place. For many, many years, Collins was pegged as the embodiment of bloated, Boomer dad-rock, with waning album sales, a jazz big band and weak covers of Cyndi Lauper and Leo Sayer songs. Come October, he’ll publish his autobiography. He has announced that he’ll record new music and launch a tour. He’s reissuing eight of his solo albums, including the four blockbusters - “Face Value” “Hello, I Must Be Going!” “No Jacket Required” and “ … But Seriously” - that blanketed the 1980s, selling a combined 24 million copies in the United States alone and generating seven No.
(Both the fairy-tale and computer-graphics definitions of “sprite” apply.) Emerging from semiretirement, Collins is launching a multimonth campaign of remembrance. Today, that feels truer than ever, as we all welcome back a familiar face: Phil Collins, the amiable sprite of pre-Internet pop. For many who were blessed to enter adulthood during the 1980s, it seems as if that decade will hover over us forever, its synth-pop bleats and recycled doomsday sound bites accompanying us into the twilight.
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