The Ten Worst Genesis Songs

Genesis are a band very close to my heart. I have listen to all their albums and songs countless times and their massive body of work forever remains a source of wonder and delight. In addition, I will readily devour any books, sites, annotated files, podcasts and interviews concerning Genesis. I am by no means unique in this regard.

But no band can be completely perfect all of the time and for all their countless spectacular career highs – from their mind-melting prog rock days to their stadium-filling pop days – there were some moments when they missed the mark. Sometimes by an inch, sometimes by a mile.

There is something to be gained, I think, in looking at some of the lesser moments from a band you love. It makes those many great moments stand out all the more. Also, as generally agreed upon by the Internet as a whole, negativity is fun!

So today, I will count down my personal Bottom 10 of worst Genesis songs. You might not agree with any or all songs on this list. That's fine. I've included the songs in question, so you can make up your own mind. Everyone has an opinion. Mine just happens to be right.

On that note, I'm Niels and welcome to Prog-Rama, my outlet for any writings related to progressive rock music.

10 The Waiting Room

The Lamb is a masterpiece of course, but at the same time, I rarely listen to the whole thing in one go. It does run out of steam on side three especially, at least, until “The Lamia” comes around. There's underwritten songs like “Lilywhite Lilith” and “Anyway” and underdeveloped ideas like “The Supernatural Anaesthetist”. And then, there's this. The Evil Jam, as it was known in rehersals. Some soundscapy “avantgardish” jams have some sort of payoff, but this just goes nowhere. Waiting for Godot. This is the kind of thing better left to King Crimson. It helps to make side three of The Lamb one of the weakest album sides in Peter Gabriel's near-flawless run with Genesis.

9 Wot Gorilla?

I don't dislike this song so much for what it is but for what it represents: one of the main reasons Steve Hackett left the band. He couldn't understand why this bit of fluff made the Wind & Wuthering album and his own, far superior, “Please Don't Touch” didn't, and yes, he's absolutely right. “Wot Gorilla” is amusing but adds nothing to the album, which already features a much better instrumental later on. It's part of a mild mid-album slog that has always kept me from truly falling in love with Wind & Wuthering. Apart from what Steve may or may not have done had “Please Don't Touch” made the cut after all, it would simply have been a much better choice.

8 Seven Stones

What can I say? The rest of my list is dominated by later Collins-led stuff, so I deemed it necessary to put a Gabriel-era song on the list. “Seven Stones”stands out as being remarkably tuneless, directionless and stiff. It's a dead point on the otherwise excellent Nursery Cryme album. It features a particularly clunky lyric by Tony Banks at his most insufferable: A barely twenty-year-old upper-class brat who wants you to know he's smarter than you. He usually has the chops to back it all up, but it backfires on a lesser track like this

7 Hold On My Heart

When I saw Genesis for the first and only time in 2007, I could feel the collective groan going through the Amsterdam Arena when the first chords “Hold On My Heart” were played. Time for a bathroom break! Coming off the similarly Banks-penned ballad “Afterglow”, the harsh transition from a 1977 song to a 1992 song highlighted just how much warmth, pathos and purity Genesis ballads had lost in the intervening years. This is so much worse than mere pop: it's adult contemporary. It's musically interesting enough not to be a complete slice of cheese, but it's about as exciting as watching paint dry. And it goes on forever.

6 Like It Or Not

I've always had a hard time with Abacab, not because it's too commercial, but because it's just kind of bleak. The mixture of pop and prog that worked so well on Duke now feels forced and joyless. It's too stark to be a jolly pop record like Invisible Touch, and it's too concise to be a prog masterpiece. I've singled out “Like It Or Not”, not because it's awful, but because it's the Genesis song I most often forget exists. It has nothing going for it whatsoever. It's just there.

5 Snowbound

Scratch that. This is the Genesis song I most often forget exists. Allegedly, it's about a killer who hides a dead body inside a snowman, which sounds like such a cool idea for a vintage Genesis dark fairy tale. Instead, it's this sentimental Rutherford ballad with some of the clunkiest lyrics he's ever produced. “Ooh, there's a snowman!” Phil Collins, bless his heart, sings it as if it's Shakespearean poetry – which only makes it stick out more. How can Genesis take a murder ballad and mess it up so badly that it sounds like a trashy Christmas song? Incidentally, the esteemed Swedish movie director Tomas Alfredson botched up a very similar idea in 2017's box office disaster “The Snowman”. Moral of the story? Don't put corpses in snowmen, guys.

4 In Too Deep

Whenever I think of Genesis “selling out”, I think of this song. Some people say it belongs on a Collins solo record, except Collins' solo records are usually better than this. There's a reason Bret Easton Ellis singled this one out as Patrick Bateman's favourite. It's a vapid song for vapid men. This maudlin monster is dripping with false sentiment and reflects poorly on the entire Invisible Touch album – which, apart from this track, isn't quite as bad as some fans think. The band have left prog far behind at this point, which wouldn't be too big of a deal, hadn't they not also left taste behind...

3 Who Dunnit?

You might have expected this at number one, but no. It's not the worst. Well, that's a lie. It is. But at least it justifies its existence somewhat by being a very deliberate attempt by Genesis to troll their audience. As such, this track was a resounding success. That'll teach them, the pretentious bastards! One imagines they were cackling madly as they recorded this eardrum-shattering “punk track”, although I can't think of any punk track that sounds quite like this. To add insult to injury, they played this song live quite often, with great glee (and to booing audiences). Well, at least someone was happy with this. But a deliberately bad song still isn't a good song.

2 Since I Lost You

What's worse? Trying to make a terrible song and succeeding, or trying to make a beautiful song and failing horribly? Yes, I know that Phil Collins wrote this song about the tragic death of Eric Clapton's son, and I know Clapton appreciated the gesture immensely. This should make me respect this abysmal ballad, but if anything it makes me despise it more. Clearly, Clapton is a more generous man than I. The dripping mawkishness and melodramatic tearjerkey ring false, and the fact that Collins was in his “Scream as loud as you can in order to hit those high notes”-phase does not help. Surely, a tragedy of this magnitude deserves a much better song. Listen to “Tears in Heaven” instead.

1 Illegal Alien

Stick a pin in this: this is the very moment Genesis jumped the shark. Everything that came after would be, broadly speaking, worse than everything that came before. This goes both for the “Mama-album” and for the bands' career as a whole. As for the song itself, it's your typical case of overprivileged English public schoolboys trying to be sympathetic towards the plight of marginalised ethnic minorities. How? By making Phil Collins do a Speedy Gonzales accent, of course! Genesis have made many songs that could have been scrapped. They have made songs that are overly sentimental, or pretentious, or just a bit ridiculous. They've even made songs that are annoying or unlistenable. But they've made only one song that actually undermines my respect for them as people. And it's annoying as hell, too.

And there's my list. Are you wondering why some songs didn't make it? Where's “Invisible Touch”, or “I Can't Dance”, or “Your Own Special Way”? Truth is, I don't mind any of those songs that much. I'm not saying these songs are masterpieces, I just don't mind them and even enjoy them from time to time. I came to Genesis late in the game and discovered their later, hit-making period first, subsequently working my way back in time. My tolerance for this period is thus maybe a little higher than that of someone who was right with them all through their career and witnessed them change. I've also excluded songs from both the very first and very last Genesis album, which are both so different from the rest of their oeuvre that I can't really hold them to the same standards as the rest.

Still, I can't deny that most songs on my list came from the thee-man Collins-fronted lineup. I think Genesis deserve all the success they got, but they did pay a price for it. To borrow a phrase: that's all!

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