When he made his 1989 solo album …But Seriously, Phil Collins knew that people were starting to get sick of his funky ass. Who else could’ve ended that party? Who else brought that level of lightweight gravitas? So it’s almost poetic that Philthy Phil’s phinal #1 hit also happens to be the phinal chart-topper of that particular decade. Through a certain uncharitable lens, it would be possible to view Collins’ last chart-topper as an example of the same kind of sociopathy that Bret Easton Ellis skewered.
In both movie and book form, American Psycho holds Collins’ music up as an avatar of slick, shallow, middle-of-the-road yuppie-ism. Collins was also an early adapter to the shiny and synthetic production flourishes of that decade, and in discovering the gated-reverb drum sound, he actually invented one of those key flourishes. Plenty of people, I’m sure, could relate. In the decade where most of his generation reached middle age, Collins went solo with an album of sad and lonely divorced-dad 808 hymns. He was just always there.Ĭollins was a creature of the ’80s in so many ways. The fucking guy flew across the world in the Concorde so that he could play Live Aid in London and Philadelphia on the same day. But when Collins became famous, he was so available to mug for any camera in his immediate vicinity that his omnipresence started to feel oppressive. In Collins, we had a truly unlikely hitmaker, a prog-rock drummer who came along at the exact right time and rode a particular musical zeitgeist farther than anyone could’ve imagined.
Within his squat frame, Collins encapsulated so many of that decade’s little oddities and contradictions. Phil Collins wasn’t the biggest ’80s pop star - though he was certainly close - but he may have been the most ’80s pop star. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Īnd so the ’80s end the only way they could end: with Phil Collins softly murmuring about poverty, as if he couldn’t drop a life-changing wad of bills into an unhoused person’s hands on the merest whim.