Genesis and Melody

Your friend is right.  Of course technically, any notes stung together in a normally pleasing and musical way is a melody, but I think he means Gabriel's vocal complements (not to mention his lyrics) are far too complex and experimental to be easily recalled, sung, understood or immediately appreciated by most people and many musicians too.   Gabriel's later solo work is much more 'melodic' in that way.   Neither approach is better--  one could say Genesis' progressive era was compositionally superior, but artistically any of Paul Simon's work is just as good as any of Peter Gabriel's.

^ But Yes and Pink Floyd did often have distinct and memorable melody, Genesis not so much.

I suppose that's ultimately a matter of opinion.
 

Atavachron has addressed where your friend's POV comes from and it is similar to George Starostin's approach also.  If I recall, he too didn't necessarily rate the melodies of Genesis very high.  

I think it is more apt to say they don't really have melodic MOTIFS delivered by way of vocals in their tracks. If you take Dancing with the Moonlit Knight, it doesn't really stick with the Can You Tell Me Where My Country Lies vocal melody.  Rather, that refrain itself keeps developing and morphing.  "Dance right on through the night/Join the dance" is the only real motif here and it only makes two appearances in the entire track.  Similar is the case with Cinema Show.  Just for comparison, Beethoven's Symphony No.9 has more repetitions of the motif in the first three or more minutes itself than does Dancing with the Moonlit Knight. 

You can see the difference already when they get to Trick of the Tail.  Squonk in particular has a much more catchy hook.  In a way, what Banks said is not wrong. It took getting Gabriel and eventually Hackett too out of the way for Genesis to start writing the pop songs that maybe he and Collins were always capable of. 

So is it good or bad?  Depends purely on what you want from music.  I am comfortable with both approaches.  Gentle Giant too have a very non cyclical approach to writing vocal melody and their melodies too are often way too complicated to be memorable by themselves. Writing catchy melody with ample number of re-iterations isn't the be all end all either.  I mean baby baby o baby baby, if you get the drift. 

But qualitatively, it is possible to say Yes were stronger at writing melody because their music wasn't any less progressive than Genesis for it. Similar is the case with King Crimson.  The vocal motif of Starless is in essence quite simple and memorable though the track per se is very complex.  The guitar motif of Starless is also simple yet effective. So I don't know that Genesis ever completely figured out this aspect of prog.  Where you take a simple idea that could be used in pop music too and snowball it into something gigantic. This is pretty much the Keith Emerson definition of prog (and Tarkus again is a good example of it).  They (Genesis) preferred complicated noodle instead.  But it's still a nice noodle methinks.

Thank you rogerthat for articulating things better than I ever could (Gentle Giant a good comparison).   Interesting that Gabriel, once he warmed-up as a solo artist, matured, and got more more focused, also began doing more specific motifs, 'songs' if you will. 

Great topic BTW, ripe with potential for discussion & debate.

^ True they were more disciplined than early Genesis ~

True, I was thinking more of songs like Panurge.  But even so, yes, there is a lot more repetition of the melody. The melody itself is often very complicated though.