Battle Of The Concept

Though I could probably go the rest of my life without hearing it again, I voted for The Wall - purely in terms of its concept. which is at least understandable.

The Wall is a pretty well  paced narrative that I can follow and seems to tell a coherent story.  I have no idea really what TFTO is about, and The Lamb - which in some ways would be my pick, just from the POV of being interestingly bent, just has way too much complicated story crammed into four sides of vinyl. And I also have little idea what it's about, if indeed it's about anything.

Forgetting about the concept part of it though, if I could keep just one it might be TFTO, just on the basis that I've always felt one day it would click into place and I'd fall in love with it.

Lamb 3.5* (too much filler)

Tales 2* (too much pretentious w**kery)

Wall 1.5* (too much Roger Waters)

Without TFTO as context for "too much" and "too pretentious", what would be the next in line album for that?

Works Volume One

To my (likely flawed) understanding...

- A street greaser named Rael is spray painting in NYC when he skates down Broadway, sees a baby lamb lie down, and all is consumed by a strange mist

- He finds himself floating in the air over a highway as small and vulnerable as a fly, then presumably gets hit by a car

- He wakes up in a strange cocoon, only to see it turn into a cage, and for a nightmarish scene to break out around him as he tries to keep track of his brother John in a cage in a cave

- He suddenly finds himself witnessing a bunch of plastic packaging being processed on a conveyor belt

- He suddenly finds himself back in NYC, a respectable tough guy member of a gang

- In order to meet the challenge of his gang mates, he reads up on sex and how to have it and be good at it, attempts to follow the instructions, only for the girl to not enjoy it at all

- He suddenly finds himself waking up the size of a tiny insect in a carpet, and all of the carpet crawlers are headed towards a particular target

- Getting there himself, he finds its a room with 32 doors and a lot of figures milling about trying to find the way out or tell him which way to go, some of them from his own life, he's flustered and frightened trying to decide who to listen to

- He decides to trust a figure named Lillywhite Lillith and follows/guides her out of the room through one of the doors

- She turns out to be evil and tries to kill him or else leaves him lying on some kind of subway railroad tracks

- After presumably being hit by a train, or killed by Lillith, or both, he meets the supernatural anesthetist, who seems to be a kind of angel of death or sandman figure

- He finds himself entering a new chamber, with a pool of water and scantily clad women like creatures bathing in it (they seem to be like sirens). They invite him into the pool, and he obliges. Instead of having sex, they begin to eat him, but no sooner do they bite into him than they are poisoned and killed by his flesh. Saddened by their deaths, Rael eats them.

- He then finds himself entering a strange land peopled by a strange colony of creatures called Slippermen, who are warty and slimy and have humongous genitals. They seem to represent some kind of ancient Greek mythological punishment for sexually depraved people in life. They want Rael to join them, saying he could be (or already is) just like them. Rael doesn't want to be like them (which angers them) and goes to the nearest doctor to be castrated so he can't become a Slipperman.

- The doctor does his job and places Rael's genitals in a plastic tube. Before Rael can take it, his brother John appears, bringing him great relief. Unfortunately, at the same time a raven swoops down and steals the plastic tube. Rael decides to chase down the raven rather than stay with his brother.

- The raven leads Rael over a sticky, muddy terrain for a while before dropping the tube into a river.

- Rael then sees his brother John floating helplessly in the rapids. He has to make a choice between the tube with his genitals and his brother, and he cries out "hey John!" Somewhere in the middle of chasing after his brother in the rapids, Rael sees a portal open up seeming to lead back to Broadway, where this whole crazy mess began. It might be here that he cries out "he John!" and decides to save his brother rather than go home. It's the most emotionally touching moment of the whole cartwheeling story.

- Rael finally gets to his brother, looks into his eyes, and then sees that it isn't his brother he's saved... it's himself.

- We don't find out what exactly happens to Rael after that. Whether he ever makes it back to Broadway, changes his life for better or for worse. What we do get is Peter Gabriel as narrator singing quite compellingly about the meaning of it. What it is and what it isn't. The point of this seems to be to leave the moral of the story ambiguous and up to interpretation, but I like to think its a bit meta and the "it" the song is referring to is the whole story and album itself, a kind of affirmation that the most important thing isn't so much the moral of the story, but the act of telling a story, or making music. It's not the lesson as much as the teaching and the performance that matters. But as I said, it's not very specific. It, more than anything else on the record, is extremely up to interpretation, and I think that's very intentional.

There's my crack at it, lol.

Tales is great musically, and may well have a concept, but it’s over the head of most listeners, I would suspect - rather than Lamb and Wall, which (for all their fantastical moments) are still more closely grounded in reality and common human experience.

To be fair, when I first saw this poll, there were no comments, and it wasn’t made clear how we were meant to be voting, so I didn’t vote based on the concept, so much as my overall enjoyment of the albums. Strangely, upon thinking about the concepts, which I guess I never really had much until now, my order remains unchanged if I were to vote based on what I think has the best concept.

1. Lamb

2. Wall

3. Tales