In 1985, I sang to a girl on a half-lit street, just a mile from the Weber River, beneath the face of the Rocky Mountains in Ogden, Utah.
I had a crush.
And I sang Phil Collins’ One More Night to her while she faded backward toward her house in – what I can only see now as – classic and honest embarrassment, for both herself and for her serenader.
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I was nine years old, heading into fourth grade, and, to me, on that night, Phil Collins’ One More Night said everything I needed it to say.
I was nine years old, heading into fourth grade, and, to me, on that night, Phil Collins’ One More Night said everything I needed it to say.
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The next day, after a summer of play with my only neighborhood friend growing up, I would have to return to the only Catholic school in Northern Utah in the center of the Latter Day Saint Culture. I knew then, even at nine, that the summer of that youth would end the next day, when she would go back to the local public school, my friend of two years would move away, and the nights of picking raspberries and playing in the ditches beneath the mountains were over.
She was my first one that got away, Carla.
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By the time 1988 rolled around, three years after the release of Collins’ No Jacket Required album, I had moved on from his music. I was in my junior high years. The raw heartache of Against All Odds, touched not a single nerve in the heart of 12-year-old boy who spent his Saturday afternoons wandering the local amusement park in the search of ‘chicks.’ The on-the-nose emotional lyrics of Collins’ work had by then been deemed “lame” by me and my group of peers.
What did we buy? What had we moved on to?
Poison and Def Leppard and Motely Crue, of course. We had sex on the brain and sex on the radio. Puberty will pull anyone from One More Night to Pour Some Sugar on Me and Girls, Girls, Girls and, of course, Fight for Your Right to Party.
We silly, really clueless, Catholic boys huddled around a boom-box during our one field day of the year where we could wear whatever we wanted and hang out in the park for all of the school day. We giggled at the sexual innuendo blaring from the box on the shoulder of a friend – until the nuns found us and threatened to whoop us, which they could still do back then.
That phase didn’t last long. Grunge came, and we followed it. Angsty and growing into high school during the early nineties, could we have hit that age at any better time in musical history? I think not.
Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Meat Puppets. And throughout all of this, through the hair bands and through grunge, I had been sucked into The Replacements and, until this day, listen to the scraggly voice of Paul Westerberg – and make my young son listen to it on the way to third grade.
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I hadn’t bought Collins’ tapes or recorded them on my tape player or requested them on the radio since in the middle of the 1980s, but, yesterday, I downloaded his greatest hits after stumbling upon Against All Odds while waiting for my Bluetooth from my iPhone to connect to the Bluetooth on my car so I could listen to Neko Case.
The opening piano strikes hit me hard. When I would usually switch from radio to Bluetooth, I didn’t. Of course I recognized the song. Anyone who grew up in the 80s would. It was everywhere. We couldn’t avoid it, the multiple, multiple awards it earned carrying it across all the airwaves.
We all stop listening, us boys who were being taught to hide our raw emotions away, and instead to focus them on the grown woman splaying herself across the hood of a fast car, and to hide them inside.
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Collins speaks about this omnipresence in a 2016 interview with CBS. He says, in his own words, that he was even annoyed with himself, his antics, like playing one LIVE AID in Europe in the morning and taking the now-extinct Concord immediately after, a luxury few have ever been afforded or could afford, and playing a second LIVE AID show that evening in the United States. But this omnipresence isn’t why I stopped listening to Phil Collins.
We all did, us boys who were being taught to hide our raw emotions away, and instead to focus them on the grown woman splaying herself across the hood of a fast car, and to hide them inside. There was nearly a decade of “Cherry Pie,” of sex driven videos on TV, and of the glamorization of young women flashing their breasts at concerts.
We wonder, sometimes, as a society, how the mix of the sexual exploitation of the 1980s and the caustic masculinity of the last century affected our youth – both boys and girls – and I don’t think the wondering is necessary. It seems plain as day to me: Mix a freedom of exploitation with the long-standing tradition of chauvinism, and we get Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, and a whole generation that turns a blind eye to their actions.
But I digress, purposefully. Very purposefully.
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Listening to Against All Odds, if you let a song like this get inside you, it can cut deep. In my younger years, I had no interest in it, even when I loved One More Night and Billie Don’t You Lose My Number. None of Against All Odds made any real sense to me, and this, coming from a boy whose mom says that I was always more emotional and sensitive than any other boy she’d ever known growing up, says a lot.
At 44-years-old, however, the song makes a lot of sense. The song focuses solely on loss. It relies heavily on heartbreak. And it exposes the feeling of being ripped apart and left in pieces and with a hole in a place that used to be whole, an emptiness brought on by losing something so important that it can never be replaced. Collins belts the lyrics out like heartbreak coming through the speakers like a knife.
Collins, according the same CBS interview, revealed that in 2006 he came within inches of losing his life to alcohol abuse more than 20 years after the release of his most famous song. His third wife had just left him, and, from what I can imagine, that hole opened up again, the hole he sang about long before he met her and lost her. He tried, like so many of us do, to fill that hole up with alcohol.
It makes me wonder if those holes are always there. Do we have them from the beginning of life with just a thin layer of skin above them like thin layer of ice that covers water after the first freeze and breaks with the slightest touch or thaws over time and exposes the cold beneath it? I think so, sadly.
It’s those emotional questions that young men are not able to deal with that pushed them toward Poison and Guns ‘N Roses and The Supreme Court.
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Against All Odds does not use long-sustained metaphor to deliver the emotional equivalence of getting a chunk of flesh ripped out of your chest and leaving a only a cavity of pain in its place. It delivers the feeling of pain in two clear, concise ways that young men really aren’t good at showing, though, as we have seen through shootings in the last two decades, should be taught to as early as they we can teach them, something I aim to teach my son now.
Collins delivers this glacier of emotion through lyrics that tell the exact truth of what it is like to lose someone you love through a delivery of voice that leaves his mouth and aches and cries into the air. This may just be pop music. This may just be why it succeeds. I get that.
Emotions are hard to swallow at any age and expressing them, for men and young boys, can be ever harder. Recognizing that we can be ripped apart by love and life and loss early might go a long way to not covering it up.
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These things, however, mean nothing to a nine year-old boy who sings One More Night to his summer girlfriend, though he felt like his life was ending because he knew it would all change the next day, and, to be honest, they shouldn’t.
These things also mean nothing to teenage boys. But to a man who now moves into mid-life, they are real. They have power. They resonate in a way that I wish they didn’t.
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Why so much talk about Phil Collins and Against All Odds?
It’s just an example, really.
Emotions are hard to swallow at any age and expressing them, for men and young boys, can be ever harder. Recognizing that we can be ripped apart by love and life and loss early might go a long way to not covering it up.
I’m lucky to have not lost my major romantic life, outside of Carla. But this isn’t just about romantic life. It’s about emotion in young men, about becoming a society that someday lets them feel it without a twenty-year gap of pushing it away.
Listen, I know that young men are going to move away from the more emotional music of their youth to the more caustic music they find to rebel with in their teens and early twenties. I know this, but is there not a way to arm them with the tools to love their coming-of-age music without adopting its ideology.
I do not have and answer.
But I am a father.
And I hope to give one young boy the tools to recognize that his emotions are valid and real and common and that young women are not put on this earth to be splayed across cars like hood ornaments, solely to get off a young generation of men.
At my age, I hope it’s not against all odds to change things.
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Photo Credit: Flickr/Mark Morgan (Attribution License)