22. Invisible Touch by Genesis

 22. Invisible Touch by Genesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpmiZ7zsHXY&list=OLAK5uy_kSuRYdMa1N5VchHRcr5qSLo8AsFcXNwos

When this album came out in June of 1986, I had just returned from the heart of Sweden in Dalarna back to my beloved Sodermanland, where I was district leader in Esklistuna. Now, I have nothing against the city of Eskilstuna, but we called the area in which our apartment was located the "Concrete Jungle." It was a large section of multi-story apartment buildings with mostly immigrants and young, poor Swedes. I had both good companions and not-so-good companions during my time in Eskilstuna. And during one of the not-so-good companions, I looked for any opportunity to extract even a tiny little bit of joy from tracting for 10 hours a day and getting rejected by almost everyone we came in contact with. One steady source of joy was the local burger joint where we could get a burger and fries and sit down and eat them as slowly as possible while the MTV played on the television. One night, to my delight and horror, a Genesis video started to play. I was delighted because it was a new Genesis song that I had never heard before. I was horrified because it featured these freaky looking muppets that were satirizing Ronald Reagan and his vision of America as a nuclear superpower. 

Now, I wasn't a big fan of Ronald Reagan in 1986, but I had voted for him in '84 election because my other choice was Walter Mondale--who managed to only win his home state of Minnesota that election. (My father--a true-blue Democrat--would have been super upset if he had known how I'd voted.) However, when I went to Sweden, I started to really dislike Reagan, not necessarily because of how his policies had destroyed jobs for local truck drivers AND farmers, but because of all the angry Swedes that yelled at me at their front door because of bombs Reagan had dropped somewhere else on the planet. Swedes really dislike war, and they really disliked Reagan's policies when it came to building more and bigger nuclear weapons. 

Anyway, I knew that this new Genesis video was going to make my life more difficult. Yet, I couldn't help but enjoy watching it. I mean, it's got two things that I really love--Genesis music and freaky muppets! 

Over that summer, I got to hear many of the other songs on the album, and I instantly loved "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight," "In Too Deep," and "Throwing It All Away" because they were perfect songs for The Great Depression soundtrack. So when I got home and found out that my brother-in-law's record collection included this album, I made a tape of it. Actually, I made a tape of all the songs except for "Anything She Does," "Domino," and "The Brazilian"--the three weakest songs of the album. But the other songs were so damn good that they became an important part of my post-mission Great Depression playlist. They have a quality about them that is very similar to the Phil Collins' songs on No Jacket Required. Some music critics have said that is a problem with the album because it signals a change from the kind of music Genesis had created in the past towards a more pop-oriented sound. But in my opinion,  I think that it is a good thing. See, the band had put out the Trick of the Tail album 10 years earlier, and although the critics liked it, the band didn't see a single hit song from it. Some said this meant that with Peter Gabriel leaving the band, the fact that the album had no hit songs meant the group was headed towards obscurity with Phil Collins as the lead singer. But 10 years later, that same band puts out an album with five charting songs from an album with only 9 songs on it. So, yeah, music critics, it's okay to like earlier stuff, but lets face the fact that a lot of bands want to make music that makes them money. That's how they get to keep making music instead of having to figure out a way to make a living doing something else--like making freaky muppets for bands that know how to write a hit song.

Nardo