![]() ![]() “The Lamb” was written and recorded during the summer of 1974. Guided by Kevin Holm-Hudson’s critical history, “Genesis and ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’,” and several biographies of the band and its members, I’ve spent the past few weeks immersing myself once again in the mysteries of “The Lamb.” On the eve of Gabriel’s induction into the Hall, there remains no better place to look for the roots of his artistic transformation. The record was a kind of looking glass for my youthful dreams, as crucial as the movies of Martin Scorsese and the novels of Paul Auster in fostering a long-distance fascination with New York that prompted my move to the city after college. I’ve been listening to “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” for three decades now, and I haven’t tired of it-which is something I can’t honestly say about the rest of the Genesis catalogue. If one measure of a work of art is the quantity of critical exegesis it inspires, then “The Lamb” is the “Ulysses” of concept albums. Computer” and the Flaming Lips’s “Soft Bulletin.” The album’s ambiguous lyrics and story line continue to generate fervid discussion and commentary on blogs and in chat rooms. In its ambition, inventiveness, and sheer strangeness, “The Lamb” is a precursor to more recent rock-music milestones like Radiohead’s “O.K. A modest hit in its day, this surreal fantasia written by five Englishmen about a half-Puerto Rican street kid named Rael has held up far better than many of the big-selling, high-concept projects of their contemporaries, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, and Jethro Tull. Representing a culmination of the excesses of the progressive-rock era and also, in some ways, a fracturing of them, “The Lamb” abides as a turning point for both Gabriel and Genesis. Gabriel’s induction comes on the fortieth anniversary of a watershed moment in his career: the release of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,” his last record with Genesis. The distance he has travelled during his five-decade career is so great that it can be hard to reconcile the prog-rock frontman of the seventies with the multicultural, multimedia impresario and human-rights activist who came later. Gabriel’s career has spanned an astonishing range of musical styles: from his early Genesis years, when he dressed in a flower costume while singing ten- and twenty-minute songs that sounded like excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan operas as reimagined by Lewis Carroll, to his later decades as a chart-topping solo act, world-music pioneer, video-music groundbreaker, and composer of soundtracks for prize-winning films including “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Rabbit-Proof Fence.” As the co-creator of the WOMAD Festival and the founder of Real World Records, Gabriel was responsible for introducing many Western listeners (including this one) to artists such as Youssou N’dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He is already in the Hall as a member of Genesis, the progressive-rock act, which was inducted in 2010. In April, Peter Gabriel will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work as a solo artist. ![]()
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