What's Sup Forums's honest opinion on Rush?

What's Sup Forums's honest opinion on Rush?

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eh

i like moving pictures + most of their 70s stuff

also like the only 70s band ever to release genuinely good material in the 00s and beyond, their last 2 albums are great

Literally the greatest band of all time.

>also like the only 70s band ever to release genuinely good material in the 00s and beyond, their last 2 albums are great

Reason for this was probably because these guys are known for being nerdcore music. They never purported to have any sex appeal, so they've aged better than the likes of Motley Crue because they didn't stake their manhood on getting teenage girls' panties wet.

A Farewell to Kings [Mercury, 1977]

The most obnoxious band currently making a killing on the zonked teen circuit, not to be confused with Mahogany Rush, who at least spare us the reactionary gentility. Imagine a power trio Kansas or Uriah Heep with the vocals cranked up an octave. Or two. D+

[Everything Rocks and Nothing Ever Dies, 1990s]

THIS

Radiohead : Muse :: Yes : Rush

Why do critics have it in for prog? I don't understand it.

DOUBLE DOUBLE TRIPS

My favorite band since I was 8. I love all their albums to death, save Test for Echo, Snakes and Arrows, and Vapor Trails, which I'm neutral on.
Their 70s work is all personal 10/10s.
80s would be 8-9/10s.
Clockwork Angels is fantastic and beautiful, especially for being relatively recent for a band that peaked nearly 40 years ago.

>Few styles of popular music have generated as much controversy as progressive rock, remembered today chiefly for enormous, high budget stage shows, science fiction, Tolkien, and literary themes, and above all for trying to bring classical music's level of sophistication to rock, a genre once dismissed as mindless noise for teenagers to dance to. The technical virtuosity and stage performances of prog bands were hailed by fans as elevating rock to the level of a serious art form. Professional music journalists didn't see it that way. To them, prog was a betrayal of rock-and-roll's populist origins, bloated, self-indulgent music soon swept away by the punk rock eruption in the late 1970s.

shit almost just got crazy

Stop. Just stop.
robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Nicki Minaj
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Critics don't like prog and metal because they don't reflect the "us versus them" mentality, the proletariat against the exploiter, the powerful against the weak. They believed that rock was the vanguard of the Marxist revolution and prog and metal led people to ignore the injustices of the world by retreating into fantasy escapism. Punk rock was hailed as a return to the true "spirit" of rock as Christgau et al saw it. Most prog and metal groups were observationists or apolitical.

So in short, prog and metal did not reflect leftist, Marxist ideals which is why they got the short end of the stick.

>They believed that rock was the vanguard of the Marxist revolution and prog and metal led people to ignore the injustices of the world by retreating into fantasy escapism
This basically. They savaged anything that wasn't fundamentally opposed to the old Western order.

His twitter feed post-Trump is the most butthurt thing I've ever read

They are some seriously talented dudes. And the first band that I learned was only three members (sounds like 6 in some songs[I know I know, studio]) and can make some crazy riffs.

...

I didn't see it, but someone linked the wall of extreme butthurt he wrote for the Village Voice website.

Neil Peart is a big admirer of Ayn Rand, a lot of Rush's lyrics were influenced by her writings.

Some prog bands (especially Pink Floyd) had socialistic views, but Rush came along and endorsed this kind of extreme anarchist individuality. Their basic message as a band is kind of how man should be a complete individualist and not rely on others to lead him around. This kind of reflected the whole Randian idea of "Fuck Marxist collectivism, the strong should just take what they want from the weak."

I can tell you bit about Italian prog scene in early 70s. all those bands were raging leftists. any prog group which had right wing views was scorned, and prog concerts were actively endorsed by socialist youth groups. but after about 1973 or so, most of that declined and prog bands got mostly apolitical.

During the mid-20th century, "progressive" politics invariably implied Marxism, and this happened as a reaction against the rightist nationalism that caused two world wars. Bearing this in mind, I think we can say that "socialism" (as a new way of mainstream political thinking) paved the way for "progressive music" (as a new way of writing music).

Also quite remarkable is the fact that "capitalism" (as a means to maximize profits) lead to the emergence of consumerism in all aspects of life, including arts (and particularly the music industry). How else can we explain the myriad of bands who emerge every day, to sell one rubbish album to today's teenagers? In that sense, "progressive music" does not have "profit maximization" as a target, and therefore is far from being "capitalist" in nature. It is safe, therefore, to claim that Progressive Rock does have some conceptual similarities with "Socialism".

Does this make sense at all?

Question: Banco's "Darwin" is about some edgy fedora-tier atheism stuff, right? I don't speak a lick of Italian so I have no idea what any of the lyrics mine, but that album has always been one of my favorites.

gr8 band

Your logic is sound, but it's dangerous to draw too big of a comparison solely on the basis of a few shared values. That same line of thought is what leads some idiots (including the current Pope) to call Christianity a socialist religion, and to claim that Christ himself was a Marxist.

They are gay

Capitalism only pretends to offer choice. I mean, nobody believes North Korean newspapers or takes them seriously, yet people still believe the myth of US consumerist culture without question.

Ayn Rand's fucked up marriage of Adam Smith economics and Nietzschian supermen is intellectually bankrupt and completely amoral. At least cite a halfway credible source for your arguments.

Hi, Scaruffi.

I'm a committedly redpilled Sup Forums kind of guy and dgaf what others think of me.

Those who think prog inherently translates into Marxism are misinformed or at least close-minded. Prog to most is comparable to art. You don't get political propaganda from most of it. Art, of course, is not for the artists but for the public.

As Noel Gallagher said, "The great thing about being in a rock-and-roll band is that there's several thousand people out there in the audience at a concert and your songs mean something different to every one of them."

t. it's up to you to interpret a song however you like, so get off your Tumblr high horses

When there's thousands of people killed in war because Zionists and US corporations exploited Muslim countries and invaded their land, it's hard to get off our high horses, so to speak.

If you analyzed carefully, you'll see that 90% of rock groups have Marxist views, oppose war, and favor world peace. That doesn't stop a rightist person of course from listening to the songs and interpreting them however they like.

And yes, it is true that Christian themes are quite common in a lot of rock as well.

Bit too much dull wank for my taste but they're alright.

Alex lifeson is under appreciated as fuck

So what, you're saying North Korean newspapers are the truth but we're too dumb and brainwashed to get it?

absolute GOAT

neil peart used to be ayn rand fuccboi

No, not at all. These are my arguments:

1. North Korean media issues blatant propaganda and lies about the Pyongyang regime
2. Nobody outside of North Korea believes this propaganda or takes it seriously
3. North Korean media is not a credible source

Continued:

1. Media owned by giant corporations like Viacom and Time-Warner with a vested interest in "fuck you, I got mine" capitalism publish naked propaganda about consumer capitalism.
2. A disturbingly high number of people believe them
3. Time-Warner and Viacom are not credible sources

Now go and read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, in which every argument is backed up with checkable and verifiable citations. His prose style is highly readable, which is more than can be said for Ayn Rand.

Christgau wrote a bunch about this. He said that various 70s musical movements like country rock and prog displayed the reactionary individualism that came to be seen as the "new" counterculture. Thus, the 60s had "Standing Together" as a catchphrase and the 70s had "The Me Decade" as a catchphrase.

Oh for God's sake...opposing war is not a right or left wing belief. No sane person likes war. Unfortunately, war is inevitable due to human nature...but the best way to have less war and more world peace is by encouraging democracy and free market capitalism. Meanwhile, you had SJWs that actively supported Soviet communism which was a totally repressive system that enslaved 40% of the planet and led to nonstop conflict for the half century following WWII.

SJWs claim to oppose war and love peace, but if they had their way, the Berlin Wall would still be standing. Take the beam out of your own eye.

2112/10

Pfft. What about the military-industrial complex that accounts for a major portion of many countries' economies? You think they don't have a vested interest in as much war as possible to safeguard their profits? I mean, they say Krupp goaded Germany into WWI.

You can definitely see it in 2112.

this. Neil and Geddy overshadow him, but he is still incredible.

You've proven nothing. All you're saying is "We must wage war in order to prevent war" when the truth is blatantly obvious that we invaded Iraq for the benefit of US corporations and Zionists. But you can go and believe all you want that Bush Nazi wanted to make the world safe for democracy.

Signals is probably their most under-rated album. So much good synth work on there.

And song "Trees" from Hemispheres

I assume you're not familiar with Henry Cow, Faust, and Area, I am to take it?

Although neil apparently claimed it wasn't about communism. But I see what you mean

Just a theory, why else then? The music is too hard to digest after drinking a couple of beers?

All I said was that rock critics have a hateboner for prog and metal, and this was about the best explanation I could come up with considering their leftist leanings. It would seem naive to dismiss the great influence Marxism holds on journalists. That's not to say that prog is conservative at all it's just may be perceived that way for the statements I quoted earlier. Remember, Marxist ideals permeate most universities and some politically correct pundits would find a fascist under every toilet seat. If you got a better theory then lets hear it, I'm open.

Well I'm not Sup Forums but

Rush is still my favorite band of all time personally, so I love them

Kinda what inspired me to get into music, and Ged is one of my biggest inspirations for bass.

I have periods of time where I go back and listen to them a whole fucking bunch and it still makes me smile.

Signals is one of my fav all around by them, kinda right in between them going from Prog to New Waveish, got a really perfect mix of both on there

IMO early prog is romantic in nature and is more inspired by that than politics. I don't think prog has any clear Marxist bent other than how Karl Marx was a 19th century Romantic. The truth is that Marxism lost any credibility as a world view with the fall of the USSR. Trying to see politics in a black and white Sup Forums vs Tumblr dichotomy is just plain dumb.

I kind of agree how professional rock critics snubbed prog and metal as elitist and that punk was the voice of the people, although mainstream media outlets in the 70s-80s like New York Times and Newsweek did not speak of prog and metal with the same level of contempt one heard in Rolling Stone Magazine, Creem, and the Village Voice.

Prog and metal were definitively working class music. Keith Emerson, both Andersons, Ozzy, Iommi, Halford, Hetfield, all of them came from very humble backgrounds.

But where did a prog group ever praise Noam Chomsky? Rush admired Ayn Rand, but I can't name one that admired Chomsky.

You don't need to namedrop political figures to sing about politics. Most Rush songs include sociopolitical commentary of various kinds, for example antiwar messages are extremely common and almost every prog or metal band has one. Peter Gabriel wrote political songs (though very subtly) while Peart was more open about it. Also applies to Pink Floyd.

I don't want to fanboy too hard here but Peart really is an incredible lyricist, like the whole of Cygnus X-1 and the battle between heart and mind, thought provoking stuff

That or I'm just stupid

I think you're confusing "Prog" with "Progg."

"Prog" refers to the style of music which has heavy influence from Classical or Jazz styles, as opposed to it's Blues-based counterparts
"Progg" refers to the "Progressive" content of the lyrics or themes

Rush is a Prog Rock band
AJJ is a Progg band(?) (I haven't actually heard any AJJ, but I say this based on what I have heard of them on Sup Forums)

Robert Wyatt mentions Chomsky by name in the song "Alliance". He also openly expresses Marxist views in Matching Mole's Little Red Record, on the cover of which the band members are portrayed in the Socialist Realism style as left wing revolutionaries. Then there's his cover version of Stalin Wasn't Stallin' on Nothing Can Stop Us and his versions of songs by Victor Jara, a Chilean dissident murdered by the Pinochet regime.

Henry Cow was also very political and quoted the left-wing film maker John Grierson on the cover of In Praise Of Learning - "Art is not a mirror; it is a hammer". This engagement continued with post Henry Cow projects like Art Bears and News From Babel.

The majority of RIO/Avant Prog bands are also left wing, some more explicitly than others.

Aside from that scene, Nick Mason refers to Pink Floyd's left-wing sympathies several times in Inside Out, although the irony of such a successful group performing "Money" isn't touched upon at all.

Politics are so bad in my country that conservators, liberals, socialists, populists, people that support dictatorships, anarchists, religious conservatives, radicals, violents, etc all of them only want to steal the monetary resources, include all their friends and relatives in the government jobs to earn lots of money without working and keeping most of the population ignorant and poor to buy their votes in election.

The situation here in Brazil is very sad because most of the people have such a bad culture of justice and honesty that they have good jobs, good houses, one car per family member, expensive TV sets, computers, home-theaters, etc and they admit they would rob if they had a job in the government. Bad habits are spread among all country, from the poorest to the richest. So it´s hard to believe in politics here.

But in my viewpoint, I think the capitalism is better if we could grant everybody to have the opportunity of study and work. If this was possible, those who had merits would be rich, those who were common people that made their work reasonable could maintain their family and those who didn't do anything because they didn't want would have problems, but only because they don´t want to work. That would be fair. I think this view is kinda left-central (welfare state, freedom of beliefs if they´re not harmful to others, ecological care, benefits to people who deserve them)

>During the mid-20th century, "progressive" politics invariably implied Marxism, and this happened as a reaction against the rightist nationalism that caused two world wars

Whatever do you mean?

I'd like to add that prog music meant a fusion of different music styles before it became firmly codified as some kind of virtuosic, epic songwriting style. Maybe later with ELP and Rush it became identified with extreme Randian individualism. Whereas earlier, rock music was a kind of communal bonding experience between the band and the audience. Of course, most of these bands had tremendous conflicts within. Close to the Edge was named because the band was almost ready to break up, not because the music was at the precipice of the real and unreal/ spiritual and material. So in a sense, (innocence) Rush and ELP broke with the romantic ideal of the music by creating something mechanistic, metallic, intellectual, dissonant and often quite modern in that respect.

That's easily explained. Rock journalists tend to believe rock is good-time fun music for teens to get off to, and when it tries to be "artsy", it falls to pieces. The more creative and forward thinking musicians will never be swayed by critics and will use an "any-means-necessary" approach to get their art recorded, with or without the corporate backing of a major record label, the DIY ethic was around long before punk rock, it always has been, so I don't necessarily think its the politics that gets a band accepted by rock critics.

It's more the idea that Christgau et al are Bohemian hipster liberal elitists who believe they're the sole "guardians" of real rock-and-roll, most of you are sheeple who need their guidance, and who can blame them when garbage like Black Eyed Peas and Taylor Swift goes to the top of the charts (and gets championed by rock journalists no less).

I'm quite the opposite of a socialist. I'm a libertarian. Not hardcore libertarian though.

Neither of those things are exactly opposites, and I've never seen the value of a system that lets a nation self-immolate without any government interference. Libertarian policies would not have saved us from the Great Depression. Laisse-faire capitalism would result in us still having Dickensian sweatshops and no social safety net or minimum wage.

Anyway, I feel fairly certainly that most prog is based on communistic ideals--Rush, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Moody Blues --- there's way too many to count or list off but you know the ones I'm talking about. They were very outspoken, you just had to know what to look for.

Gee, IDK. Politics is a big motivator and most journalists want to change the world somehow. But you're definitely right about BEP. :^)

Not saying music journalists aren't biased SJWs, I just didn't think it was the main reason why they lauded punk and denigrated prog, but the music community and the art world in general is and always has been dominated by SJWs.

Let's not forget that prog and metal were both born in Europe, specifically the UK, and then spread to the rest of the continent. How many great prog bands came out of the US? There wasn't any real American metal scene until the 80s. The US is the biggest music market in the world and it controls the trends. Most American journalists like Bangs and Christgau merely believed rock=faster country/blues. They didn't like prog and metal because they thought those genres were a European mutilation of an inherently American form of music, it didn't fit American sensibilities, and they just plain didn't "get" it.

Eh? Tons of them, including Kansas, Echolyn, Happy the Man, Cairo, Thinking Plague, Spock's Beard, Enchant, Discipline, Fates Warning, Kevin Gilbert, Shadow Gallery, and Dream Theater.

Keep in mind that tons of Brits hated prog as well, the primary message of punk rock being a reaction against prog bloat.

I always assumed that prog, when it started in the early 70s, appealed to nerdy kids who couldn't relate to the greaser/redneck Rolling Stones or Grand Funk Railroad fanbase. Also prog set forth the idea that rock could be more than the limited 3 minute single about teenage love or being angry at your parents, that it could feature complex song structures, instrumentation, and storytelling. My uncle played keyboard for a couple local bands in the 70s-80s and he did so by studying ELP, Rush, Yes, and Kansas records note for note. As silly as those bands might have seemed, they inspired a lot of kids to pick up an instrument.

It always seemed to me that the critics' vendetta against prog/metal in the 70s was ridiculous considering neither genre was in any danger of taking over the airwaves. Radio play was (as it always is) dominated by the 3 minute pop single. You never ever heard Black Sabbath, Rush, Jethro Tull, or UFO on the radio.

Of course you never heard punk on the radio either for that matter. Punk no more killed prog than grunge killed glam rock. Both genres died a natural death and something moved in to fill the void.

Lester Bangs claimed that bands like Yes and Led Zeppelin didn't produce a truly iconic rock star personality like a Hendrix or a Morrison or a Jagger, the guys in those bands all felt fairly anonymous. He also said they were pretentious as fuck and charged big bucks for their concerts while giving mediocre shows and acting like you were lucky to be blessed by their mighty presence. For comparison, he said a band like The Clash were in it for the love of their craft and delivered excellent performances at 1/10th of Zeppelin's budget.

Bangs was just being his usual cynical self. He lacked Christgau's idealism entirely. Pay it no heed.

FWIW, Robert Plant in interviews always comes off as smarter and more articulate than Mick Jagger. I guess Bangs thought Jagger's dance moves made him a more exciting and picturesque character.

RIO stuff is partially named as such strictly for political reasons, and technically only really exists as the six or so original bands.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you, necessarily, but most of those bands were part of a specific culture within prog rock anyways.

Zeppelin always preferred it that way, they saw all four guys as equal and didn't want one member of the band to overshadow the rest. Also I think the whole rock star personality thing is a bad idea because yes, Springsteen, the Clash, et al had personality and produced interesting music, but we star seeing rock star personality be used as a substitute for less than outstanding music. Thus you end up with the very average Oasis getting undeserved publicity due to their rock star posturing.

He may just be talking about comparative US bands to things like ELP, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, etc--to which the US really doesn't have any answer, save for, arguably, Frank Zappa.

People bring up Kansas (and later Proto-Kaw, I guess) but fun as they were, they were always playing catch up to UK sounds.

What about the voice of Geddy Lee? How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy.

The funny thing about the condemnation of Prog as excessive and pretentious is that it was just the wrong kind of it--the Clash claiming they were the only band that mattered or the excess of general big name rock of the time isn't really all that different from Prog's brand of it.

Shock? Most critics of the time didn't like Led Zeppelin and Bangs was hardly an exception, he like all his compatriots thought the New York Dolls and The Clash were better. Him and Christgau wrote some interesting columns, but I'm far from agreeing with their beliefs.

Like I said, prog was inherently European and Americans always came up short.

I do see the point to an extent. The punk bands in 1977 were comprised of fresh, young, edgy kids who wanted to take on the world, just like Sabbath, Grand Funk, and Zeppelin were in 1969-70, by taking on the world with their raw, balls-to-the-wall approach.

Please remember as well:

*LZ didn't exist in a vacuum, there were dozens of great bands in their day
*LZ were seen as a lot of excessive hype--they always played arenas from day one and never woodshedded. I guess Bangs was saying "What's the deal with these guys? They aren't that good." I guess for comparison, punk bands seemed much more honest, pure, and underground.
*LZ were iconic, but it took a while before their legacy was cemented and they were far from universally loved in 1970.
*Rock journalists of the 70s were often exceedingly smug, verbose, and self-important (Christgau is far from unique in that regard). Most of them didn't "get" Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin at all. To his credit, Christgau was one of the few critics who did appreciate Zeppelin (if not Sabbath). But all of them glorified Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bruce Springsteen. Those guys were their heroes, not Ozzy Osborne or Keith Emerson.

I think as far as Lester Bangs was concerned, his anti-Zeppelin beef was motivated by jealousy since he was an aspiring, but failed musician. He also had a huge hateboner for Blondie and Debbie Harry, with a sizable dosage of misogyny thrown in as well. In this regard, he was completely the opposite of Christgau, who was cool with Led Zeppelin and idolized Blondie.

A lot of the institutional bias against Zeppelin and Sabbath only got lifted when Kurt Cobain cited them as an influence.

Yes but worse