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.

Rush--"Vital Signs" (Part One—where I barely discuss the song at all)

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.

X Ambassadors – “Renegades”; or, When You Probably Shouldn't Go Determinate

I don’t have a lot to say about this song because it isn’t really good or bad: it’s a catchy piece of radio fodder with a message fitting for our age—be yourself, do your own thing, don’t just go with whatever society tells you, be a special snowflake just like everyone else, etc. (It’s not surprising that this quickly got picked up by a Jeep commercial.) 

All of this is well and good and generally uninteresting except for the one point where its generic and bland exhortations to do something different actually gets specific—at that point this song gets stuck in my craw:

All hail the underdogs
All hail the new kids
All hail the outlaws
Spielberg's and Kubrick's

Even if we can overlook the conflation of underdogs, new kids, and outlaws with renegades, the choice of Steven Spielberg as one of the only two concrete examples of a “renegade” in the whole song just shows how ludicrous the song’s understanding of what it means to be a renegade really is. I’m not trying to put down Spielberg—I’ve enjoyed his movies, and it’s clear that he is a very creative and talented person who has had a big influence, but none of that makes him a renegade in any meaningful way. If he was ever an underdog, new kid, or outlaw, Spielberg hasn’t been one in a very long time. (I’m also not entirely sold on Kubrick as an example either—sure he was original or perhaps even pioneering in many of the things he did, but I don’t know if that’s the same as being a renegade.) I guess the band decided to go all renegade on the definition of renegade.