So one of my complaints about the
X Ambassadors song “Renegades” was that it used a largely content-free and
pretty watered-down notion of what it means to be a “renegade.” The result of that
is a song about “living like a renegade,
where the “like” part of that phrase does all of the heavy lifting, i.e., not about
what it might actually be like to be a renegade, just posturing like one.
Anyway, that got me thinking about songs that handle this topic better, and I
want to discuss Rush’s “Vital Signs” as such a candidate.
Now just as I had to do a little
introduction about The Posies and The Mountain Goats since they are bands that
mean a lot to me but aren’t exactly on everyone’s radar, I will kind of do the
same for Rush. Now, Rush are a lot more successful and well-known than either
of these bands and have an incredibly dedicated fanbase (I can’t imagine there
are too many other acts who release so many live albums that sell so
consistently), but for all of that there is a sense among fans that Rush doesn’t
get the recognition they deserve. (Although they did recently get the hall of
fame nod, whatever that’s worth, and that let their guitarist Alex Lifeson give
his epic acceptance speech—a speech which, in what might be a sign of its comic
genius, I’m ambivalent about: on the one hand, the way he gives all of the
appearance of sense with his use of pause and intonation is well done, and the
satirization of the general meaningless of the blather that passes for such
speeches is apt, but on the other hand, its hard not to detect a level of mean-spiritedness
to it that might go a little too far, maybe a little too long. But I think it’s
ok to walk that line and perhaps fail because it was still a hell of a thing to
attempt.)
Anyway, I can definitely expose myself as a typical Rush fan insofar
as I got into Rush in my teens and I saw in them a unique voice decrying the
bland conformity of the world around them and I have all the albums (including
most of the live ones) and I’ve seen them live three times already and I do think
that Rush does need a little bit of explaining since most people don’t really
know the real Rush.
Ok, now that I’ve got that out of
my system, it can be easy to dismiss Rush as pretentious—they can seem too
earnestly concerned with virtuoso musicianship, too nerdy, too Ayn Randy (in
their early incarnations), too Geddy Lee screechy, and more—and all of that is
largely true, but there is an honesty and a sense of playfulness to what they
do that redeems all of that, you just might not always know it from the few
songs of theirs you regularly hear on the radio. Anyway, “Vital Signs” is the
last song off of Rush’s 1981 “Moving Pictures,” which was their biggest album
(it’s where “Tom Sawyer” comes from, for instance), and also probably the album
with the best punning synergy between title and cover—it’s so good.
Anyway, the first thing that I
expect strikes listeners is how reggae and groovy it sounds with the syncopated
guitar-work—something that I imagine seems very un-Rushlike until you think
about how much prog is about weird time signatures and about what was going on
with reggae and new wave at the time. There is an interesting interview with
Neil Peart (Rush’s drummer and prime lyricist) done by George Stroumboulopoulos
where Peart discusses the burgeoning awareness of reggae and New Wave at the
time—you can definitely hear it here.
As far as Rush’s development as a band
goes, it fits in perfectly in a thematic/musical trajectory that goes “The Spirit
of Radio”—“Vital Signs”—“Chemistry.” The
first song is off of the album “Permanent Waves,” which is just prior to “Moving
Pictures.” “The Spirit of Radio,” which gets a fair amount of radio play (not
surprisingly since it is a paean to the liberatory potential of radio), has a
really interesting groove section near the end (3:47) where they play off of
the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” and it is all about
the potential impact that technological media can have upon our lives. “Chemistry”
is off the album after “Moving Pictures,” “Signals,” and it forms an extended
analogy between chemical reactions and human relations. It’s not one of Rush’s greatest
songs by a long shot, but it does capture one of their abiding concerns—how the
developments of the modern world (particularly the scientific and the
technological) affect the ways we think about ourselves without simply decrying
them as negative. I think that “Vital Signs” participates in this conversation
as a perfect middle ground, delving into the parallels between life and machine
in order to produce a picture of life that is very far from mechanistic.
