Genesis

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Easily the best Genesis album

Review Score:

(10/10)
This is one of the most adventurous recorded works ever undertaken, and I'd recommend it to anyone with the urge to hear something new that will, with repeated listens, move you and thrill you. Y'know, like music's supposed to do.

Peter Gabriel has remarked that the main character of the story basically goes on an adventure through which one gets a better understanding of self; the transformation theme. It's curious how listeners debate the lyrical meaning behind this great rock drama. It was perfectly clear to me the first time I listened to it.

Actually, that's not quite accurate. It became perfectly clear to me once I gave the thing a fair chance.

The actual sound of the music is (as always) much more "important" than the mere words in regards to how a piece strikes the ear. In that sense, Lamb can be listened to several dozen times and the ear will continue to catch something new each time. It's a masterpiece.

Eno's involvement was minimal -- Gabriel has said that Eno hardly did anything, and nobody quite knew why they gave him credit. I was glad to read that before I bought the CD. I don't like Eno's "wallpaper music" philosophy.

Rael, the main character in the lyrics, is a cast-off, ignored by the snotty masses, suspiciously eyed by racist policemen (as explained in Gabriel's liner-note narrative) and trying to make a name for himself in some tiny capacity by spray-painting his name onto a subway wall. Gabriel also writes of the "low-market mal-nutritioned." This is Rael. He's a half-Puerto-Rican sacrifice on the altar of Broadway stereotypes, the inferior vagabond who must exist -- and remain hungry -- to support this grand illusion that the avenue's icons contribute to. In order for people to feel superior and identify with the archetypical Broadway symbols that Gabriel mentions (in other words, in order for all of this "lifeless packaging" to be successfully sold to the well-behaved consumers), there must exist the inferiors. One of them is Rael, the sacrifice, offered up on Broadway so that others may live in their illusions and feel more important than they really are ("having slept on pictures that others only dream on").

The lamb is, in many mythologies including the Christian one, a symbol of sacrifice. This (thankfully) does not mean that the plot is religious in any way. Far from it. This is the modern Western World, elitist, cheesy, utterly superficial of course -- and Rael is one of the sacrifices enabling the plastic society and its participants to exist. Rael has fallen down on Broadway, "mal-nutritioned" and perhaps even woozy from paint fumes. First he forgets what he's doing hanging around outside, even failing to remember his little graffiti project. Then he can't even move. Finally, he faints. This lamb, this sacrifice to society, has passed out from hunger. (Later, after his heart's shaved by the memory of his first failed romance, he notices his old lamb's wool at his feet.)

Rael eventually finds his true self, whoever that might be, rejecting the tough-guy character he's always had to play on the streets. This is only done by confronting himself. And he only manages to confront himself after passing out from the very hunger that served as an aspect of his low social status -- made him Broadway's sacrificial lamb -- in the first place.

At first, he appears to himself as his brother John so he can ease himself into facing his own identity. His hallucinations make the album just as lyrically fascinating as Alice's Wonderland. His unconscious visions make him feel reborn via a cocoon, victimized by commodity and its lifeless offices, facing his fears of sexual inadequacy, realizing that religious people are merely intoxicated and over-fed folks who covet material symbols (although Gabriel finds pity for them, even while likening their symbols to other myths: "The fleas cling to the golden fleece/hoping they'll find peace," as he sings in the beautiful "Carpet Crawlers"), escaping from social customs thanks to a blind woman (appearances can be deceiving?), and other experiences that amount to his confronting his fears: of death, of getting too attached to a woman and not being able to protect her from danger, of being perceived as a monster, of never being satisfied or content, of losing his true self if he's driven nuts by his inability to consummate his frustrated machismo via sex (and vice-versa: of losing his sexual savvy if he acts too human or doesn't put up a tough, supposedly attractive front).

He eventually chooses to save his own warmth and humanity from drowning. So much for "We don't believe in pain." Then he wakes up -- or dies. Hard to tell. Listen to the music and you'll come to your own conclusion.

"It's over to you."

Excellent album. I highly recommend it.

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