Best opening lyric

As a kid who grew up in a small town in the Ontario wasteland in the 1980s, I would like to offer that they bridged the burnouts and the geeks, which was no small task.

I’m by no means a big Rush fan, but they’ve kind of grown on me. The way they handled themselves had a big part in that.

Nickelback will always be terrible, but their recent sea shanty video shows they may be learning to lean into the joke a little.

My scorching hot take on Canadian music is that the Hip aren’t that great. I’d say their fans are more off-putting than those of Rush.

 

Yeah, I've generally found Rush fans to be astoundingly humorless and condescending. Like, to a #leavebritneyalone extent.

Thank you for not moving on to the more common Rush defense, which is "unusual time signatures!" Like math proves they're the best.

Bottom line -- it's perfectly OK to like Rush and enjoy the lyrics while also acknowledging how staggeringly pretentious they are. Neil Peart liked to use as many words as possible to make a rudimentary point. They could laugh and poke fun at the "pretentious" label because you can't write those lyrics and then be upset if someone says they're pretentious.

Let me put it this way: Elvis Costello is on my very short list of my favorite songwriters of all time. He has a remarkable gift for wordplay -- elaborate and clever phrasing that rhymes, is perfectly in meter... and frequently the entire song would be written during a three minute cab ride from a pub to the studio. Last week I was listening to a podcast where someone wrote those songs off as just sort of a masturbatory word trick; the equivalent of doing the Sunday crossword in ten minutes, clever and ultimately pointless. That criticism came from Elvis himself, who acknowledged he can write songs like that with little effort and can't really explain why. He doesn't write that way anymore because he'd rather say something in plain language than show off while saying very little.

And those early songs are still great... but he's ultimately right about a lot of them.

I will throw out one other thing about Rush, and Sam, you're clearly an exception to this: the Rush fans I've known are generally not music fans. Like, at all. They're literally the guys I knew in junior high with the wristwatch calculators. They are here for the time signatures and 300 piece drum kit and, forgive me, pretentious lyrics. They do not listen to anything else. (Oddly, this is also true of hardcore Springsteen fans. They've been to 80 shows and can tell you exactly how many times he's played "Wild Billy's Circus Story".... but they won't recognize "She's the One" on the radio until the vocals kick in.)

 

Damn did you guys have to start with the Rush stuff here??? My freshman dorm-roommate played Rush and "Tom Sawyer" EVERY DAY!! Drove me nuts. Now you bring those memories flooding back...thanks folks.

 

I was provoked!

 

I never understood how so many Rush were and are not fans of music in general. And because of my relationship with music, I never will.

Different time sigs can be good. And Rush did some different things ... obviously not uniquely their own. But sometimes, variable time sigs are just a way of telling anyone trying to read the music on a page that they're doing this no matter what anyone says. Genesis' "Firth of Fifth" is wondrous to me ... but if you've ever seen the intro (first minute before anyone hears Pete's voice) and instrumental notes put on a page, you'll see the numerous time sigs. Tony Banks knew what he was doing and knew what he wanted ... but couldn't make it work with any consistent time sig, so it looks as if he wrote what he wanted and did the various time sigs as a workaround. (Maybe someone will ask Banks about it sometime).

And the difference between musicianship and overindulgence of notes is subjective as all get out, of course. I think Genesis, Rush, much of Pink Floyd and early Marillion did it better than the others, but there is all sorts of room for interpretations, hot takes and opinions.

My enjoyment of Rush comes from what they do without lyrics, too. "La Villa Strangiato" might be the best track they ever produced. "YYZ" is incredibly good, as well ... Geddy's skill with the bass allows him to take the lead and let Alex play rhythm background ... see also "Leave That Thing Alone." None of them have a word in them.

It's not all about Neil's lyrics. Not even close.

Your story about Elvis Costello is symbolic of what many of his ilk have done ... tried something else and eventually realize that either they've done that to death or realize that their evolvement makes going back either impossible or not palatable in any way, shape or form. Rush went into synths a lot more in the '80s - didn't bother me at all if you've heard any Genesis beyond just the hits over its last three albums with Phil Collins - and decided they had done enough. Rush also stopped with some of the '70s epics ... they stopped short of rolling out the p-word, but didn't want to go back. "2112" worked well in 1976, not 1996 as far as they were concerned. Peter Gabriel did the costumes and such while he was fronting Genesis, but Phil wisely decided not to follow in his footsteps. David Gilmour and Roger Waters might have been pistols at five paces, but Pink Floyd wasn't going back to psychedelic after Syd Barrett almost killed himself.

They all evolve. Some fans consider it betrayal and leave. Others embrace them and continue following. It seems as if the key is to change, but only a little. Evolution, not whiplash pivoting. Or something like that.

 

Still a modern day warrior ... what can I say?

Well ... not quite. But I'll accept responsibility.

 

My list of good Canadian bands/musicians:

1. Neil Young
2. The Weakerthans
3. Ron Sexsmith

There. I think that's exhaustive. (I love Canada, but sweet Jesus, the musical contributions are dire.)

 

I can still hear Geddy on the Bob and Doug record: "Hey, ten bucks is ten bucks." (And only Canuckistanis of a certain vintage will remember how crazy big they were for a little while.)

As great a drummer as Neil Peart was, his books are also tremendous.

And Lifeson's episode of Trailer Park Boys might be the most popular one they ever produced. I have seen it dozens of times.

 

I also grew up in Ontario in the 1970s and 80s - mot in a small town but in a bigger city wasteland - and you're right, Rush merged the metalheads and the kids who read Lord of The Rings, nobody else was doing that.

Your point about the Hip is a fair one. I'm a fan, saw them a few times, including the first Toronto show on their final tour, and even though their records were largely duds (their first few albums are easily the best) their hardcore fan base was fanatically protectionist of them, about how Canadian they were and fuck the Americans who couldn't understand how great they were. To them being a Hip fan was all about summer weekends on the dock blasting "New Orleans Is Sinking" or singing "Wheat Kings" around the fire at night or bragging about how many times they saw them in a small club in the US somewhere that was full of nothing but Canadians. (Disclosure: I saw The Arkells, a band that sells out arenas and amphitheatres here, in a small club full of Canadians in Dublin in the summer of 2019.)

I wonder if Neil Peart had gone public with his cancer diagnosis if the reaction to his death would have approached anything close to what happened here in the wake of Gord Downie's passing.

 

Ricky : [Narrating] I may have called him a male prostitute. I don't remember exactly, but very well he could be a male prostitute. You don't know that. But he got pissed off at me, saying 'Oh, you kidnapped me!' It wasn't kidnapping, so if he's gonna say I kidnapped him, I'm gonna call him a male prostitute.

On your other post, I don’t think Peart going public would have led to a similar reaction. Rush just hasn’t traded on being Canadian the way the Hip did.

I actually don’t mind the Hip, but like Springsteen, a large segment of their fan base expects you to worship them and only them.

I do think they blew their appearance on SNL. They should have gone back in their catalogue and played something more rocking. I’ve read that was the plan and they switched to “Grace, Too”.

 

"Shut up and play "I Like To Rock"

"That's April Wine"

"Then play that Diane Sawyer song"

 

Standin' on the corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset, Janey's in her vest
And me, I'm in a rock 'n' roll band