Genesis – Land of Confusion

Genesis Wrote Their Protest Song, Then Handed It To The Satirists Who Mocked Them

Mike Rutherford had spent his whole career steering clear of protest songs, and Spitting Image had spent the mid-1980s turning Phil Collins into a latex punchline. In the fall of 1986 the two histories met in the same three minutes of MTV. Land of Confusion carried the angriest lyric Rutherford ever gave Genesis, and its video handed that lyric to the satirists who had been mocking the band. Looking back, Rutherford said the song got away with its message for a plain reason: “maybe because the music was quite angry it made it work.” The music was half of it. The puppets were the other half.

Keep watching: Genesis – That’s All · Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer

The song came out of the same group improvisations that produced the rest of Invisible Touch. Tony Banks, Collins and Rutherford wrote and recorded the album at The Farm, their own studio in Surrey, between October 1985 and February 1986, with Hugh Padgham co-producing. Banks built the bed from synthesizers and synth bass, Collins drove it with acoustic and electronic drums, and Rutherford supplied the guitars and the words. Those words were a rarity for Genesis by then: a survey of a world run by men who have lost their grip, a plea to Superman, and a closing promise that the listener’s generation would have to fix the mess itself. The album placed it third in the running order, right after the title track.

A protest lyric over a hard electronic groove was a gamble for a band that had just taken its title track to No.1 in America that July. When Billboard reviewed the single on October 25, 1986, it heard a nervous rhythm under a guardedly hopeful lyric, and Cash Box singled out the tough electronic pulse and Collins’s searching vocal. Neither review predicted what the video would do.

The satirists were already on the case

Spitting Image, the British puppet show created by Peter Fluck and Roger Law, had already caricatured Collins on air. Rather than complain, Genesis brought the show’s production company in to make the clip, and Fluck and Law’s workshop built new puppets of all three members. Banks appears behind a bank of synthesizers and a cash register. Rutherford plays a four-necked guitar, a joke on his double duty as guitarist and bassist. Two Collins puppets share the stage, one drumming and one singing. John Lloyd, the show’s producer, directed with Jim Yukich, who had made the band’s That’s All clip in 1983, and Jon Blair produced.

The plot belongs to Ronald Reagan. His puppet goes to bed at 4:30 in the afternoon beside Nancy and a chimpanzee, a nod to his 1951 movie Bedtime for Bonzo, and drifts into a nightmare. He pulls on a Superman suit and runs down the street while Mussolini, Khomeini, Gorbachev and Gaddafi address crowds from giant screens. Combat boots march past the heads of Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand and Henry Kissinger. A spoof of the Band Aid and USA for Africa sessions gathers Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Queen Elizabeth II and an electric-guitar-playing Pope John Paul II around a single microphone. The final gag waits beside Reagan’s bed, where two buttons sit side by side, one marked Nurse and one marked Nuke. He presses the wrong one.

MTV played it constantly, and the song rode the video up the chart. Atlantic released the single in the United States in October 1986 as the third from Invisible Touch, and Billboard’s Hot 100 placed it at No.4 in late January 1987. Virgin issued it in Britain on November 10, 1986, in a sleeve that parodied the half-shadowed band portrait of With the Beatles, and it reached No.14 there while going top 10 in West Germany, Canada, Ireland and the Netherlands. It became one link in a chain no band had built before: five singles from one album in the US top five, with Invisible Touch, Throwing It All Away, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight and In Too Deep completing the set.

Beaten by the old singer, then not

The awards season kept running into Peter Gabriel. At the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, Land of Confusion was nominated for Video of the Year and lost to Sledgehammer, the clip by the man who had fronted Genesis until 1975. Robert Christgau ranked it the best video of 1986 in his Village Voice Dean’s List, published March 3, 1987, yet the paper’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll put it third, behind Sledgehammer again. Europe was kinder: at the Diamond Awards Festival in Antwerp in 1987, Spitting Image Productions collected the best group video prize, and that medal now sits in Cambridge University Library. Then the Recording Academy introduced a Best Concept Music Video category for the 30th Grammy Awards in 1988, and Genesis took it ahead of nominees from Janet Jackson, David Bowie, Kate Bush and David Lee Roth.

The proof that the song never depended on the jokes came almost two decades later. Disturbed recorded Land of Confusion for Ten Thousand Fists in 2005, swapped Reagan’s nightmare for a Todd McFarlane animation about a dollar-sign army, and in 2006 the cover became the band’s first No.1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart. With the puppets gone, Rutherford’s lyric held up on its own. The latex never disguised a weak protest song. It gave a band famous for avoiding sermons permission to deliver one, and the anger underneath was strong enough to outlive the joke.