1974 (CD Charisma)
An analytical reflection by Ken Scarbrough:
Why New York City? Why Broadway? I suppose the Big Apple of the early to mid-seventies has come to exemplify a certain collective, earthly consciousness now apparent in the vehicle we call the Internet. After all, that British expatriate John had chosen with Yoko to make Manhattan his home. On the album “Rubber Soul” John encourages us ‘to say the word and be free; say the word and be like me’. As we all know, this Manhattan of the seventies would become the final cauldron within which Lennon expressed his reception of the word. Similarly, in “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”, Genesis and Peter Gabriel utilize the setting of America’s preeminent city to flesh out their rendition of the word.
The ever-questing consciousness of the imaginative center or narrator of this work might simply be defined as Gabriel’s mind’s eye. For this occasion, Gabriel has chosen a New York resident of Puerto Rican background with a predilection for subway graffiti to serve as his hero. Yet, throughout the album as we peel away the various layers of the narrator’s ‘selfhood’, we arrive within an internalized quest of Gabriel’s imagination known as Rael. I would like to refer especially to Professor Harold Bloom’s essay “The Internalization Of Quest-Romance” which courtesy of the vehicle the Internet, is easily available to all. True to any inward exploration, the listener (and indeed, the reviewer) should abandon linear notions of time and narrative and look for the reality of simultaneity and totality.
All this takes place without a single sunset, without a single bell ringing and without a single blossom falling from the sky. Yet it fills everything with its mysterious intoxicating presence. It’s over to you.
Giving the substance to this peculiar tale from Gabriel’s mind’s eye, Rael’s selfhood is a labyrinth: ‘it’s the bottom of a staircase that spirals out of sight’.
Musically and lyrically, the first side of “The Lamb” delivers a great segue of observational powers tied to the milieu of the seventies, which opens up to the mythic underpinnings that constitute Rael’s quest. As I continue to listen to this album, I find the passage from the opening track to Fly On A Windshield, to Broadway Medley Of 1974, to Cuckoo Cocoon, to In The Cage to be one of the most convincing passages in the genre of progressive rock. Most notably, Steve Hackett delivers a clandestinely authoritative guitar solo in Fly On A Windshield counterbalanced by Tony Banks’ formidable synthesizer solo in In The Cage. And who hovers ‘like a fly waiting for the windshield on the freeway?’ Well, ultimately we all exist under the shadow of death, but here peeling away the layers, we find Gabriel’s mind’s eye. Consciousness of death ultimately informs the various levels of Rael’s labyrinthine journeys: ‘there’s something solid forming in the air, the wall of death is lowered in Times Square. . . . anyway, they say she comes on a pale horse’, but I’m sure I hear a train.
In the genre of the quest-romance, the hero leaves the safety of the castle, engages in a perilous journey through a wilderness, faces down some sort of monster and perhaps returns to the safety of the castle somehow transformed. In this connection, for example, I’d like to refer to “Sir Gawain And The Green Knight”, Tolkien’s “Lord Of The Rings” and George Lucas’ “Star Wars”. These are overtly external quests. In the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, the quest has become internalized. Monsters such as The Green Knight or say Tolkien’s Ringwraiths now inhabit the maze of selfhood. The work of Freud may largely be only a historical footnote to modern psychology, but Freud’s insights on the sacrifices made by the human animal to live within the norms of civilization show up nicely in whatever transmission of events occurs in “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”: the primacy of sexuality occurs in Counting Out Time, Lilywhite Lilith, The Lamia, The Colony Of Slippermen; the continuing background of death is laid bare throughout the album: Fly On A Windshield, Cuckoo Cocoon, Anyway, The Supernatural Anesthetist and It. Woody Allen wasn’t the only one musing on love and death in the seventies (what Freud calls Eros and Thanatos in his “Civilization And Its Discontents”).
So, Rael the graffiti artist and the core imagination behind him are very discontent within the boundaries of civilization: ‘you’re sitting in your comfort you don’t believe I’m real, you cannot buy protection from the way that I feel’.
Foremost, graffiti artists are protestors and Rael rails against all of the compromises required of one to live within our civilized confines. In “Civilization And Its Discontents” Freud argues that science (powerful deflections), art (substitutive satisfactions) and intoxicants represent some of humankind’s ways of making the compromises collective life requires. Perhaps this album is one confessional, imaginative gesture on Genesis and Gabriel’s part not only to lay bare the human condition, but also to suggest an artistic means of embracing our discontent.
Meanwhile from out of the steam a lamb lies down. This lamb has nothing whatsoever to do with Rael or any other lamb, it just lies down on Broadway.
Temporarily setting aside the great Judeo-Christian symbol of “The Lamb”, there is one sacrifice evident throughout this album: the revelation of the internal quest of the imagination of the ‘the narrator’. The true sacrifice occurs as Gabriel’s mind’s eye confronts all of the compromises we make with Freud’s great powers of Eros and Thanatos in our need to share a collective life with our fellow humans. Rael is one mask of sacrifice to be worn for this occasion. I think the answer lies in the salvific powers of narrating one’s internal quest.
So what then could be the reality of simultaneity and totality? Is this a vision of a timeless, ubiquitous reality that, through the imagination, delivers listeners to the word to transcendence? Or is it the peak of human creativity, reflecting the human capacity for self- awareness, the result of an evolutionary process in a universe that just happens to be there? Whatever the answer might be, I’d like to return to the image of John Lennon at his piano in Manhattan and to Peter Gabriel and Genesis’ peculiar tale of an internal quest as working models towards just such a provisional answer.
As a postscript for the year of 2010, we might suggest that “The Lamb Lies Down” via the Internet.
© Dick van der Heijde 2024