"In the Air Tonight" (Phil Collins)

I'm not a Phil Collins fan.

I confess that I once owned a copy of No Jacket Required and frequently hopped around my bedroom to "Sussudio" as a kid.  I also ran across the cassette again in college and decided to pop it into the tape deck for old time's sake, and I couldn't stand more than 2 minutes of it.  Let's just say time wasn't exactly kind to the album: way too glossy, too synthesized, and too derivative of what Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Prince were doing at the time.  (Let's be honest, "Sussudio" is a complete rip-off of the song "1999.")

Don't get me wrong, Collins is a talented guy.  It's just that 99% of his music makes me want to hurl pea soup like Linda Blair.

So it's strange to me that I have such an affection for the song "In the Air Tonight" from Face Value (1981).  

Or, actually, it's strange to me that the same guy who did a cheesy, non-ironic cover of The Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" on his very next album was capable of something this singular and unhinged.  It's simply a badass, minimalist masterpiece of brewing tension that slinks along on a hypnotic digital drum pattern before erupting in a fury of live drums, drenched in gated reverb.  It makes you want to hop into your vintage Daytona Spider and hunt down scar-faced coke dealers, Crockett and Tubbs-style.  (Or, at the very least, start air drumming like a tool.)

Side note: there was an urban legend that the song was autobiographical.  Story went that Collins had witnessed a man die—specifically, he saw one guy let another drown but was too far from the scene himself to come to the rescue.  So he wrote the song as a cryptic message to the negligent party.  Then (just to make the rumor juicier), he supposedly spotted the guy at one of his shows and confronted him from the stage.

Of course, this is bullshit.

The real story is that Collins was pissed off after going through a divorce.  He was playing around with his drum machine, liked what he heard, and decided to lay down some scratch vocals without having any real idea what he was going to sing.  Apparently, the nefarious-sounding lyrics poured out of him spontaneously, on the spot.  

I think if I'd been his ex, I would have gone into the witness protection program after hearing this.