Small worlds / Phil Collins, The World Won’t Listen

I met Phil Collins (the British artist, not the British pop star¹) at a bar in Brooklyn in the mid 90’s. At the time, I didn’t know him as “the British artist,” I knew him only as my friend Tom’s legendary boyfriend. I remember little of the night, but I do remember a hubbub accompanying Phil Collins’s wanderings around the bar; he seemed to create some kind of event wherever he went. At some point, he approached the table with two tall drinks, placed them in front of me, and said something like “These are from an admirer of yours.”

As it turned out, they were from an admirer of his, and this admirer perceived, shall we say, a lack of gratitude when his drinks were given away. There was a confrontation, as I recall, and Phil said something like, “Well, I’m sorry, I never turn down a drink, but you can’t honestly expect me to drink [disbelieving voice] rum & coke?” (Or whatever the drinks were).

All of which serves as background to my reaction to Phil Collins’s piece, The World Won’t Listen, at SFMOMA, which was pretty excellent. The premise is pretty simple: He filmed young Turkish folks singing along to The Smiths best-of compilation “The World Won’t Listen.” The effect, on the other hand, is deep and resonant. The Smiths’ odes to teenagerdom — all vacillating emotions, frustrated inarticulations, piercing moments of understanding, sexual ambiguity — take on a deeper social dimension through the voices of (in many of the cases) non-English speakers. Add to this the fact that the singers are Middle Eastern, and it becomes difficult to avoid a political reading. Songs like “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” sounds less the over-dramatic nihilism of a Western teenager and more like a very real plea from a teenager caught in an increasingly fundamentalist world:

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please don’t drop me home
Because it’s not my home, it’s their
Home, and I’m welcome no more

Really impressive.

Cool: a web posting for the event that he filmed.

¹ Speaking of the British pop star, here’s a classic: The video for “Sussudio” [YouTube]