The Enduring Catharsis of Genesis' "Duke"

For a dedicated, if critical, progressive rock fan like myself to have maintained a music blog for nearly ten years and not once dedicated a post to Genesis is a pretty glaring omission. Predictably, I have opinions about the unique arc of their oeuvre, but I have waffled for years now on the best way to do justice to their unique transformation from 70s symphonic surrealists to 80s radio staples.

Now the recent Facebook “game,” in which the participants post the cover art from a personally enduring album once a day for ten days, has forced my hand. For a pathological music listener like me, choosing only ten albums to represent all of the most enduring music in my collection was nothing short of tortuous.  After much deliberation, however, I came up with a list that I could mostly live with.

Until one of my nominees posted Duke.

I considered this 1980 release from Genesis when I made my list, but gave it a pass in lieu of other subjectively important progressive rock milestones.  Duke is very personal for me, though, and seeing it posted by someone else felt as if I had failed miserably. I can think of very few albums in my collection that have been more enduring and that I have come back to more often than this unique and sadly overlooked gem. In an act that was equal parts penance and anticipation, Duke found its way back into rotation this Spring.  Now, months later, it would be a contender for album of the year if it had not already earned the title at least four times already.

Duke was in no way my introduction to Genesis, and for a very long time I probably would not have even counted it among my favorites. Initially, I appreciated the album as a unique axis upon which Genesis’ past as progressive rock innovators and their future as a pop outfit rotated.



Throughout the past three decades since I added this album to my library, Duke has retained its initial prog-pop fluency.  The album has revealed layers of depth, however, as my life experiences have unfolded.  Like most, I experienced breakup and heartache as a teenager and a young adult, but it took going through a divorce and, later, having children to really grasp Duke’s narratives.

Duke is, arguably, a concept album about fame and failed relationships,  The themes that hold Duke together were inspired by the toll that the band’s extensive touring schedule exacted on Phil Collins’ disintegrating marriage. Fueled by the ordeals of his private life, Collins finally shed the vestiges of Gabriel’s surreal storytelling and revealed a uniquely personal iteration of Genesis. That his expressions are genuine are, I think, beyond question. I can think of few songs more gut-wrenchingly vivid than Please Don’t Ask, which captures the emotional arc of a grieving man’s internal dialogue as he struggles to keep his composure in the face of deep loss.



Despite being so personal, Duke is not a solo album.  Genesis was made up of three distinctive songwriters, and its a feat of collaboration that they were able to trace the outlines of Collins’ ordeals so clearly. In fact, the perspectives of Collins’ bandmates contribute greatly to Duke’s success. Of particular note is keyboardist Tony Banks, who wrote a multi-movement composition describing an artist’s relationship with the public eye. To distance themselves from their earlier work and perhaps generate a single or two, the band elected to edit the movements of this long-form piece throughout the album. Weaving this narrative in this way imparts Duke with the sense of an objective storyline that frames Collins’ more personal and subjective insights.



This narrative structure suggests that Duke might veer into "rock opera" territory, but a close look at the libretto shows that any story that revolves around a character named "Duke" is more a suggestion than plot.  In fact, such a character is never named in the entire album, and his counterpart "Duchess" only exists as a song title.  Rather like the character "Billy Shears" did for  Sgt. Pepper's,  the idea of "Duke" is set up so vividly in the opening tracks of the album that he frames the listening for all the songs that follow, whether he is intended as an actual character or not.

Looking at the emotional facets of ending a relationship from both inside and out, the band unified their work around Collins' struggle, resulting in a focus that is unique in the Genesis catalog. As a vocalist, Collins called on emotions in ways that he never had before, harnessing an edgy screaming range that would become his signature for years to come. The band’s instrumental aspects, which were always top-notch, rose to meet the challenge of backing his cathartic delivery, and aside from a missed opportunity for a humming low end, the production captures these performances with convincing clarity. I have a hard time imagining any album with better drum sounds than those on Duke.



Revisiting Duke over these past few months, I keep thinking about how it's a shame that the album isn’t considered more highly than it is in the prog-rock pantheon. To be blunt, however, it was too pop to be prog and prog to be pop. Like 90125 and Moving Pictures, it stood at the crossroads of these two genres and was able to inhabit them both with distinctive ease. What makes Duke so enduring, however, its its brutal honesty in describing an experience, both musically and conceptually, that I could only relate to after going through my own trials.