Rush—“Vital Signs” (Part Two—Music Video Edition)

To begin I’m linking to the official music video not only because it provides a baseline version of the song to discuss (I am eventually going to be linking to others because there are some interesting variations in some of the live versions) but also because its visuals illuminate the content of the song.

But before I get to discuss that, let’s talk about the title first: vital signs are the elements of bodily functioning—temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate—that typically get measured in order to determine the state of a person’s bodily health. The monitoring of these functions and their comparison against baseline values, is where I think the concern with “deviating from the norm” first comes from. We monitor vital signs because most of the significant things in life—both good (love, excitement, etc.) and bad (stress, disease)—involve big changes to the vital signs and deviations from the standard state. They are vital signs after all, and as the first lines of the song clearly declare, “Unstable condition / A symptom of life / In mental, environmental change.” Non-conformity is a vital sign, a sign (or symptom) of life. The music of the song reflects this: the rhythmic pulsing of the synthesizer that the song opens with, and then that of Geddy's bass, forms the background that the staccato rhythms of the guitar play off of, giving the song its off-kilter reggae energy and creating the musical version of the "unstable condition" that the song takes as its theme.

This idea gets taken up throughout the rest of the song in terms of nonconformity as a signifier of individuality insofar as individuality occurs as a deviation from the norm, i.e., is defined against the forces of bland conformity. This is a staple theme in the Rush: the storyline of their breakout record, 2112, is that of a young man rebelling against the brainwashing of a totalitarian empire after learning to play his own kind of music. Similarly, songs like “Free Will” engage with this idea, as do other songs on Moving Pictures itself (“Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight” in its own way, “Red Barchetta,” and the anti-“mob mentality” song “Witch Hunt—Part 3 of Fear”). This anti-conformism continues in the next album Signals (a title that indicates a continuation of “Vital Signs”) in songs such as “Subdivisions” (which has a chorus containing the line “Conform or be cast out”).

But what is particularly interesting about how “Vital Signs” tackles this theme (apart from its distinctive musical features, which I've already said a bit) is the mechanical and electronic imagery that it aligns with individuality rather than against it. Normally if you speak about computerization and technology in relation to individuality you tend to get pessimistic results: there tends to be talk of the coldness and sterility of “artificial intelligence,” the standardization and mechanization of the human, and all of that sort of stuff. But not from Rush, and not just in “Vital Signs.” Even in a dark album like Grace Under Pressure—my favorite of their albums—you get a song like “The Body Electric” which combines lots of groove with a story of the humanization of the mechanical in the form of an escaped robot searching for freedom. (Note: I think it’s the weakest song on the album by far, but still think its useful data.) Anyway, the unique thing about “Vital Signs” is how almost all of its imagery is electronic, specifically the electronics of the recording studio. Here’s most of it (or at least what I’ve caught):

“interface and interchange”

“impulse”

“circuits get shorted”

“interference”

“signals get crossed”

“balance distorted”

“reverse polarity”

“mixed feelings”

“Process information at half speed”
“Pause, rewind, replay”
“Warm memory chip”
“Random sample, hold the one you need”

In one way or another all of these terms refer to the processes and tools of recording music, of working up the tracks on the mixing board that make up a song (hence the particular importance of “mixed feelings).

The video demonstrates how integral this whole “recording studio” element is to the song. The opening image of the video is an electronic representation of the sound waves of the song itself--showing just how dynamic those vital signs can be, followed by a quick series of cuts to each of the members of the band and then a mise en scene of them playing in a recording studio from the perspective of the sound engineer at the mixing board. Then we get to see images of each of them playing their instruments as well as Geddy laying down the vocal tracks (complete with headphones).

Until about 0:26 (when Geddy finishes the “environmental change” line) the image has some kind of filter or effect that makes the image a little blurry (maybe oversaturated? I don’t know film effects enough to know), and this effect briefly comes and goes before finally taking hold for the rest of the song at around 3:38, as Geddy is singing the “Everybody got to deviate from the norm” outro.

At 1:53 we have the perspective of the sound engineers looking into the studio but with the image of Geddy’s head as he sings superimposed over the middle of the window.

At 2:37 we have an almost blank, milky-white screen in which a small hole opens up to reveal Geddy singing underneath.

At the end of the song, around 3:04, after the superimposition of the original soundwave graphic over Geddy playing keyboard, a second window opens up in the lower left which showcases the bass solo playing at that point. After that we get a good look at the context in which Geddy is singing, and we see that whereas all of the images of instrumental playing show the three members playing together, when Geddy is laying down the vocal track he is alone in the studio. This becomes particularly clear during the outro, which actually has the camera pulling away from Geddy and backing out of the studio to reveal him as the only one performing at the time.

Ok, so what’s the payoff of all of this. I’ll try to explain in part 3.