ABSTRACT
The experiences of young Rael—the half-Puerto-Rican "street punk" Peter Gabriel created as his protagonist for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—would be altogether different if Rael were, for example, an East-End Londoner. Music critic Jon Landau once asserted, "The criterion of art in rock is the capacity of the musician to create a personal, almost private, universe and to express it fully". The real difference between progressive rock and "pop" of the day, according to Moore, "lay in the connotation the style had for its audience; for few students and hippies did the music function primarily as entertainment". Once a musical style seems to spontaneously emerge from the "streets" or from the "ground up," as it were, the music industry isolates particular features of that style and thus constructs the new genre as a marketing category. The "art for art's sake" aesthetic inherent in progressive rock once again dovetails with the hippie culture's propensity for the obscure and arcane.
