Rush Revulsion:

A Love for Hating On a Profit-Gulping Dinosaur

I hate Rush—irrationally, hallucinogenically, and with utter malice.  Hate is not what this blog does: this will be the one exception.

I’m not alone:

• This often-cited article calls Rush the Most Hated Band of All Time. This claim, while entirely agreeable, is unsubstantiated.
• iHeartRADIO, substantiates their claim with compiled data and algorithms – Science! – ranking Rush a modest 18th on a list of the 21 Most Hated Rock Bands of All Time.
• The LA Weekly put them at #9, calling them the anchovies of rock music. 
• Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Wild: “Regardless of their success, Rush has never achieved critical acclaim... most of it gives me a headache...Rush really hasn’t done anything unique.”
  
• Brian Cogan, PhD., author, professor, media consultant, pop culture expert, and Rush hater consulted for the Convince Me to Like This Band podcast: “Rush are overrated and pretentious hacks who, with Neil Peart’s lyrics, have provided reckless creedence to offensive political ideologies.” 
• In 2007, Blender Magazine’s Worst Lyricists in Rock named Neil Peart #2. (He was robbed.) As one blogger avered on Peart: An ace on the rototoms, a train wreck on the typewriter.
• Spin Magazine: Rush isn’t cool.

And yet, Rush has cultishly devoted fans – though, the band’s fanbase scaled past cult status back in the Carter administration. They’re rabid, hypertrophic, and raging with album-cover-tattoos levels of psychosis. See r/Rush Reddit and the forums and marvel at how fans pour over song minutiae with an OCD perseveration as if they were Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s fandom at a blazingly insurrectionist level of alarming.

And their fans have only bred like flies: Rush is ranked third for most consecutive gold- and platinum-selling albums in rock history (askmen.com claims they come in fourth)—behind only The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. This devouring public can’t all be incels.

About those incels: The trope is that women hate Rush too. Women have never been big consumers of Prog—not even in this homeopathic, middle school, technophobic version of dystopian sci-fi. Rush concerts were famous as gyno-deserts. (This Salon article disagrees.) But to be fair, near-desert conditions: these audience photos show that there are at least two women here, and a couple more here.

Many have argued that Lee’s voice is the problem. The most often reason cited for Rushophobia. Geddy’s refusal to rein it in was an act of defiance and, maybe, for that he deserves some props. Also to his credit, when Rush began, no one sounded remotely like Geddy (nee Gary Lee Weinrub)—except maybe Tiny Tim. After the rise of Rush, the world would be lousy with Geddy Lee-type squealers—Bruce Dickinson, Sebastian Bach, Justin Hawkins, Vince Neil, etc. In the beginning, Rush was a Canadian bar band version of Dreadful Zeppelin, without the testosterone. But by album #2, Rush knew the hard bar band sound wasn’t going to serve their arena-sized ambitions. For them, the smell of napalm in the morning was the legitimacy of Prog Rock, and they threw in with the tropes of the time. Then, Prog was already rife with Tolkeinisms and anachronistic fantasy. Rush wasn’t the only band to plod through musical suites that clocked in longer than heart-transplant surgery. 

Back to those vocals: Lee’s sphincter-clenching caterwaul was Rush’s most distinguishing feature—like an incel car alarm receiving a surprise prostate exam. Other, even less charitable descriptions: 

• Soprano-ish banshee wail
• Dog-calling falsetto shriek
• A near-chipmunk bawl
• Cat being chased out a door with a blow-torch up its butt
• Sounding less like a bird of prey than a castrato with a gerbil up his ass. 

(The last two were a bit much, even for me. Mine was better.) 

The second time I heard Rush, it was 2112 (1976). The Temple of Syrinx (see below) was like a CIA renditioning technique. And those liner notes: Dedicated to the genius Ayn Rand. (A claim even Peart would later find embarrassing.) Over the years, the band would be accused of being rightwing propagandists.

Sample lyric: I stand atop a spiral stair/An oracle confronts me there/He leads me on light years away/Through astral nights, galactic days

(At least Peart shares Ayn Rand’s need for heartless editing.) 

That’d be the last time I’d ever here Rush again—unforced anyway. Their creep into rock radio was, however, already tragically underway.

I do get why suburban cracker boys worshipped them. They looked like them – the boys left in the grass after the teams were chosen. Rush is The Revenge of the Nerds in band form. (They were famously not a great attractor of groupies.) Rush fanboys may be blinded by the band’s technical proficiency. And the haters, they say, will never understand music as deeply intellectual and arcane—like some kind of Masonic David Foster Wallace. Guitarist and drummer—Alex Lifeson (nee Zivojinovich) and Neil Elwood Peart, respectively, always wielded every chop at their disposal at every opportunity. If they were playing actual axes they could’ve deforested the Great White North long ago. Some of their mid-period work got rather fusiony (like YYZ), and deftly so. I’ll give that to them: Props for platinum-selling an otherwise unpopular, esoteric, and meandering genre to the multitudes.

The Fanboy zeal has allowed Peart to publish a load of books as a writer or co-writer, including seven of fiction. He even has an illustrated quote book. Despite his fan-reputation for “erudite” lyrics, I submit Virtuality (still milking the computer anxiety):

Like a shipwrecked mariner adrift on an unknown sea

Clinging to the wreckage of the lost ship Fantasy

I'm a castaway, stranded in a desolate land

I can see the footprints in the virtual sand

Net boy, net girl

Send your signal 'round the world

Let your fingers walk and talk

And set you free

Geddy would say: “Even I can barely make sense of our concept albums.”

And then, the evolution of the Rush aesthetic: 17 years after their debut album, Geddy Lee matured from his unctuous helium-registers and began to move, at last, into his adult period. While Rush were not Prog innovators, they did help ride its wave into the enormous profitability of Arena Soft-Prog (think Asia, Genesis, Supertramp, Moody Blues). 

With that, the band did something I would’ve thought impossible: they also became less hatable. They became shopping mall music: Whether they went to the mall or the mall came to them is hard to know. Though, until the glorious day when Tom Sawyer takes its spin on the world’s last Classic Rock station, the battle between the haters and the stans will rage on.