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| They deserve to be happy, dammit. |
If you tied me to a chair and compelled me to listen to the Rush album
of my choice, it would be their first album. So, on the grounds that my
favorite Rush album basically is not a Rush album, I am deeply unqualified to comment on them. I wanted to start there.
That said, someone asked and I was thankful for the opportunity on a couple levels. First, and most obviously, Neil Peart, Rush’s legendary drummer, and a rock icon if there ever was one, died quietly and gracefully earlier this month. The second level cuts deeper: a friend of mine from high school and a decade after, now long passed, loved Rush with the heat of a thousand suns. He loved everything like that, not quite uncritically – he had a rotating hierarchy as to which was his favorite album – but his overall enthusiasm for Rush (and The Rolling Stones’ harmonics) was sincere and unwavering. I can still hear him singing "the Keith parts" as we walked around school...
Rush was a large part of the background music for my high school years because of that relationship, but he wasn’t the only vector: I liked (and thought I) related to “Tom Sawyer” as much as your average lightly-alienated teenage male, but “Limelight” was always my special jam (and, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Red Barchetta”); Moving Pictures dropped for all of us, basically, but, turned on as I was by (first) classic rock, then college/punk rock, I wouldn’t have heard anywhere near as much Rush as I did because of that friendship (as well as several others, which, happily, continue to this day).
I had my favorites – e.g., “Spirit of Radio,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Trees” (why? you got me.) – but I effectively checked out after Moving Pictures. I have dim memories of “Subdivisions,” and I have a loose/possibly concocted memories of my departed friend’s bafflement at Roll the Bones, but my memory isn’t reliable and I have no means of confirmation, so I’d say my personal book on Rush started and ended with Moving Pictures and their most radio-friendly material…which, as I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, probably wasn’t their artistic focus.
Moving on to the music, I look at Rush the same way I look at classical music. I understand its appeal and respect the holy hell out of the technical side…but, even after a couple weeks’ listening, it doesn’t do anything for me. The biggest barrier is simple: the things that interest them don’t interest me; moreover, even when they touch on something that does interest me (e.g., feeling like an outsider), I don’t connect or even relate to the how they think about it. To speak ill of the dead, I’d rate Peart as one of the more tin-eared lyricists I’ve ever heard: they stick to a rhyme scheme, but the lyrics sound like someone reading a book (and a dense one) over the music, instead of playing with it, against it or off of it.
That said, someone asked and I was thankful for the opportunity on a couple levels. First, and most obviously, Neil Peart, Rush’s legendary drummer, and a rock icon if there ever was one, died quietly and gracefully earlier this month. The second level cuts deeper: a friend of mine from high school and a decade after, now long passed, loved Rush with the heat of a thousand suns. He loved everything like that, not quite uncritically – he had a rotating hierarchy as to which was his favorite album – but his overall enthusiasm for Rush (and The Rolling Stones’ harmonics) was sincere and unwavering. I can still hear him singing "the Keith parts" as we walked around school...
Rush was a large part of the background music for my high school years because of that relationship, but he wasn’t the only vector: I liked (and thought I) related to “Tom Sawyer” as much as your average lightly-alienated teenage male, but “Limelight” was always my special jam (and, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Red Barchetta”); Moving Pictures dropped for all of us, basically, but, turned on as I was by (first) classic rock, then college/punk rock, I wouldn’t have heard anywhere near as much Rush as I did because of that friendship (as well as several others, which, happily, continue to this day).
I had my favorites – e.g., “Spirit of Radio,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Trees” (why? you got me.) – but I effectively checked out after Moving Pictures. I have dim memories of “Subdivisions,” and I have a loose/possibly concocted memories of my departed friend’s bafflement at Roll the Bones, but my memory isn’t reliable and I have no means of confirmation, so I’d say my personal book on Rush started and ended with Moving Pictures and their most radio-friendly material…which, as I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, probably wasn’t their artistic focus.
Moving on to the music, I look at Rush the same way I look at classical music. I understand its appeal and respect the holy hell out of the technical side…but, even after a couple weeks’ listening, it doesn’t do anything for me. The biggest barrier is simple: the things that interest them don’t interest me; moreover, even when they touch on something that does interest me (e.g., feeling like an outsider), I don’t connect or even relate to the how they think about it. To speak ill of the dead, I’d rate Peart as one of the more tin-eared lyricists I’ve ever heard: they stick to a rhyme scheme, but the lyrics sound like someone reading a book (and a dense one) over the music, instead of playing with it, against it or off of it.
