Down Through the Top: Genesis, "Hold on My Heart"
One of the final Genesis singles seemed to have receded from memory—or mine at least. That makes it all the more powerful.
Down Through The Top will be a series of essays on songs from the early-‘90s French charts. It’s a tribute to my golden years a Top 50 enthusiast, and an excuse to follow vintage popular songs into the rabbit hole. (Credit is due: the series is inspired by Stereogum’s The Number Ones, by writer Tom Breihan.)
A few years ago, The Dissolve, an elegant, short-lived magazine on cinema, published a series of articles titled Forgotbusters. Their aim was to revisit older box office hits that hadn’t really left any cultural mark. Entries included a lot of A-listers’ B-movies, from Tom Hanks’ dog-cop comedy Turner & Hooch to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Eraser. One of the best picks was James Cameron’s Avatar, once the highest-grossing movie of all-time, still slated for a sequel to this day, and yet devoid of any true emotional resonance in public memory (have you ever seen an Avatar meme?).
We Can’t Dance, the penultimate album from British rock shapeshifters Genesis, feels very much like a pop music forgotbuster. Released in October 1991, the album sold at least 10 millions copies, spawned 6 singles (out of 12 songs) and a 68-date world tour. We Can’t Dance entered the pop landscape just a month before Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. Even though Dangerous exists on an entirely different plane than We Can’t Dance, both albums represent peaks of the CD-era monoculture, before social media factions, when a tent-pole release would feel inescapable across TV, radio and store shelves all over the world.
In their previous incarnations, Genesis had been prog-rock pioneers, but We Can’t Dance confirmed their status as seasoned commercial giants, after a 5-year hiatus where frontman Phil Collins continued his own decade of dominance as a solo artist. In France, We Can’t Dance was a particularly strong success. The record stayed 16 months in the charts and went double platinum. Four of its singles would take turns in the Top 50 throughout 1992 and 1993. Granted, this is not an album that outperformed any of the era’s blockbusters, like U2’s Achtung Baby or Nirvana’s Nevermind, but in terms of sheer visibility, We Can’t Dance could feel equally momentous.
There are probably corners of music fandom where We Can’t Dance is considered an everlasting masterpiece. Among classic rock fans, the album now seems divisive at best. “Full of obnoxious, overproduced pop pap” wrote Ultimate Classic Rock, who ranked it the second-to-worst Genesis albums, right above the group’s final, Collins-free Calling All Stations in 1997. In prog rock circles though, a few fans seem inclined to give We Can’t Dance a pass, at least as a farewell to the group. (A magnanimous commenter on progarchives.com sums it up nicely: “What to say about my least favorite album by my favorite band? It's still a good album!”)
I was 10 years old when We Can’t Dance came out, and to me, it shall forever remain a bygone artifact of a more innocent time—a Garden of Eden record. As a kid, it was part of my life for a brief moment, and then it wasn’t. The album just vanished, and nothing in the pop conversation ever brought it back on my radar, despite, maybe, the occasional memory of the faux-ZZ Top walk from the “I Can’t Dance” video.
When I rediscovered the album a few months ago, in the midst of an early-pandemic spree to ease anxiety through comfort music, I was surprised to realize I actually heard it before. Skimming through We Can’t Dance was one of those moments where you surprise yourself at finding a memory, clean and vivid, in a random corner of your mind. I remembered that weird intro noise—actually a slowed-down guitar sample—and the feverish glee of the hook in “Jesus He Knows Me”, or the guitar chords from “Tell Me Why”, which I still associate, strangely enough, with the Streets Of Rage soundtrack. The songs’ thematic undertones—parental abuse, televangelism, world poverty—had been lost on me, all I had kept was the color of the sounds.
I tend to remember how I received the first important albums of my life, but We Can’t Dance goes blank. My strongest theory is that a friend from school named Nicolas made a tape copy for me. Nicolas was an easygoing kid from my neighborhood. I forgot his older brother’s name, but I wish I could thank him one day—I owe him both the discovery of Thriller and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (which, as far as childhood music recommendations go, is a five-star success).
Some time in 1992, I spent a memorable afternoon at Nicolas’ place, an apartment that oversaw the central square of my neighborhood. It was fun. At one point, Nicolas brought out a pair of boxing gloves, put them on and tried them out by punching me in the face. Later, he grabbed one of his brother’s 12-inches, placed it on a kiddie record player and started scratching like it was the end of the world. Predictably, the experience drove him nuts, so he smashed the record and sent it flying through the window. I can see the image of that shattered record, down the pavement. I still can’t tell if it was horrific or hilarious.
Suffice to say, my reading grid of We Can’t Dance remains the judgment-free reading grid of a 10-year-old. I could read any clever analysis of the shortcomings of late-period Genesis, my point of view would stay rooted in some kind of shrugging, childlike acceptance. And one thing remains true, both for my younger and today’s selves: “Hold on My Heart”, the album’s third single, gets close to pop perfection.
“Hold on My Heart” has long been believed to be a solo effort by Phil Collins, but Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks debunked the idea. "I was playing a fairly respectable chord, but putting the wrong bass note to it," he would later demonstrate. "You're desperate for it to resolve, and it finally does, it just… Immediately you've got a song." No matter how it came to be, the song definitely belongs to the upper echelon of Collin’s Pantheon of brooding, stripped-down love ballads. “Hold on My Heart” finds him sketching prudent thoughts, looking down the cliff of an unguarded love declaration. He’s been there before, and now here he is again, in that strange realm between hope and anxiety, knowing everything can change. It’s brilliant. Phil Collins hardly ever resisted going for big-bang stadium songs, but he would always be at his best when he simply sat down with a synth and a drum machine (“Can’t Turn Back The Years”, released two years later, is another high mark).
“Hold on My Heart” embraces electronic instruments with a loving generosity. The technology was no novelty in 1991, but you can tell Genesis was still in awe with the majesty of a synth pad or the crisp steadiness of a TR-808. In “Hold on My Heart”, the instruments sound brand new, straight out the box, with little to no tweak to their default settings, and yet they feel at home along those heroic guitars. This kind of ample, slow-moving synth is a common thread across my favorite singles of that period, from Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” to Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”, which would enter the charts in October 1992, just a week after “Jesus He Knows Me”, the final single from We Can’t Dance.
A few months ago, a reddit user named LordChozo added another layer of understanding to the allure of “Hold on My Heart”. He made a great point on how the song’s unusual structure, just like its expansive synth, make it feel otherworldly:
We can all agree that it’s pop, but it’s nothing like what we’d expect a pop song to sound like. We expect some alternation of verse and chorus, maybe a bridge, maybe a repeated chorus. Something like an A-B-A-B-C-B-B or even A-B-A-C-A-B song structure, I don’t know, just spitballing here. Instead, we get “Hold on My Heart”, which is A-A-A-A-B-B-A-A. What in Peter Gabriel’s name even is that? Six verses and a double bridge? What? I just...what?
It’s something I had never put my finger on, and that detail helps me understand why I love that song so much in the first place. “Hold on My Heart” indeed moves at a constant pace, following a straight line without any big climax or breaking point. Even when Phil Collins reaches the top of the song’s crescendo, his “I will be there” seems constrained, as if he was shying away from his own voice. The song is very flat, in the best possible way, like a luxury cab from an imaginary future, hovering through the night in cruise control.
Writing about “Hold on My Heart” thirty years later is a delicate exercise. Getting closer to a long-forgotten song makes it almost too mundane, too familiar, and knowing it too well ultimately dilutes its fleeting mystery. “Hold on My Heart” is a majestic song, but it may get even better as a blurred impression. It might have been engineered that way: all its building blocks come shrouded in the same haze, from the synthesizer’s ghostly presence down to the video’s empty bar and slow motion. “Hold on My Heart” could be proof that some of the most memorable songs are meant to exist within you, the actual listening experience secondary to the trails it leaves. Woven into the mind’s fabric, these songs can remain pure and untouched, in that sweet spot between memory and oblivion, back to where they belong.
This is the second article in Nowhere Somewhere, a collection of essays on popular music, and maybe more. The first one covered the beauty of the bonus tracks in The Fugees’ The Score album.
Next entries might feature other reflections on older pop songs, quick takes on movies, investigations on random rap mysteries, all intertwined with personal memories and unnecessary digressions. If that sounds like something your inbox needs, feel free to subscribe.