Review of Kevin Holm-Hudson, Genesis and "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" (Ashgate, 2008)

[1] The trajectory of the music-theory community's acceptance of rock music has been steadily climbing and has recently reached a new stage with the arrival of Kevin Holm-Hudson's Genesis and "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway." Two early books on the analysis of rock, Understanding Rock (1997) and The Beatles as Musicians: "Revolver" through the "Anthology" (1999), shed light on the significance of this moment. Coming after a handful of analytical articles on rock sparsely placed in journals, collections, and on the internet, Understanding Rock, a volume of analytical essays edited by John Covach and Graeme Boone (Oxford University Press), firmly established the role of rock-music analysis within the field of music theory. Yet the book's preface tells the story of the first-ever session on rock in either the Society for Music Theory or the American Musicological Society and ends with a presentation of the editors' "justification for analyzing rock music" (Covach and Boone 1997). Among a handful of other books on the topic over the next few years was Walter Everett's impressive two-volume treatment of the complete oeuvre of the Beatles (Oxford University Press). In his preface to the first volume, Everett defends the idea of applying analytical tools learned in academia to the output of musicians who could not read classical western musical notation (Everett 1999). Now Ashgate Press has published Kevin Holm-Hudson's Genesis and "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway," which, long past the days of explanations of and apologies for the genre as subject matter, unashamedly offers a book-length treatment of a single album, thereby granting it the status of a masterpiece of no less legitimacy and dignity than, say, The Rite of Spring or Wozzeck.[2] Holm-Hudson's love for the group Genesis, for their milestone album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and for the performance history of this concept-album-as-song-cycle shines through on every page. After a brief description of a live performance of the entire double album in the Shrine Auditorium in 1975, Holm-Hudson tells us, chapter by chapter, about the cultural and economic context of the album, its recording history, its musical and narrative structure (with an analysis of each song), the album tour and its reception in the press, possibilities for its interpretation, and the post-album history of both the work and the band.[3] In presenting the historical and social context of the album, the first chapter runs into a problem as it enters the thorny realm of cultural semiotics. That field (especially in relation with rock music) veers between saying one moment that the world of meaning is a horizonless plane of personal, situational readings and endless deferral of reference, while claiming in the next moment that any given cultural artifact means something quite definite; Edward Macan's claim that improvised solos are universally connected to acid trips comes to mind (Macan 1997).(1) Tellingly, musical semioticians generally disagree with each other concerning these identified meanings. Holm-Hudson cites and quotes Macan along with Allan Moore, Simon Frith, Paul Stump, and others, but does so uncritically for the most part, as if what they say about progressive rock is simply true. As a result, the first chapter includes a confusing array of assessments that seem at times to contradict each other. On page 13, for instance, money "fueled" the experiments of progressive rock, while on page 15 progressive rock is definitely not a commercial enterprise. On pages 8 and 21 the music has no roots in or connection with African-American music, yet on page 14 (quoting Macan), "Progressive rock is thoroughly grounded in African-American musical concepts." On page 11, progressive rock's multimovement forms, shifting meters, and complex arrangements attempt to bar Establishment conformists from accessing this expression of hippie subculture, although on pages 16 and 17, the same intricacies represent (quoting Macan again) "the hippies' ultimate accommodation to the conventions of industrial society. …