Rush-“Vital Signs” (Part III—Commentary Plus Alternate Versions)

Now, keeping in mind that this is long before the widespread takeover of autotune and the disgrace that it brought to the recording industry, I think that there is still going to be some resistance to thinking about our inner lives in terms of recording. The problem is that it makes it seem as if we were merely machines, that what we think of as most ourselves is merely mediated and cobbled together from a variety of external sources (those “interfaces and interchanges” and “interference” and “mixed feelings”—in particularly the sense in which we have “mixed feelings about the function and the form” being unable to come to terms with them).

But, and I think that this is what the recording studio setting in particular suggests, it doesn’t have to seem so bad if you consider that that is also how songs get made. The song that, as I’ve already discussed is the spiritual predecessor (literally) to this song, “The Spirit of Radio,” even explicitly argues the case for the role of technology in something like self-reflection in these lines: “All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted / Not so fully charted its really just a question of your honesty.”

Complicated artifacts that they are—in some cases, perhaps infinitely so—works of art have often been taken to be at least analogical to human beings because they appear to form dynamically self-contained and self-regulating wholes. Indeed, all of the processes that “Vital Signs” concerns itself with are essentially concerned with the regulation of external inputs (that is what recording is after all), so the anti-conformity metaphor is essentially an issue of how one comports oneself in relation to the outside. The persistent emphasis on mediation in the music video, the parade of images of the band putting together the many pieces of the song that is playing in the video only serves to underscore what an achievement the song is, what work went into it.

In terms of the central message of the song, that you have to “deviate from the norm,” we can think of the norm as simply taking things as they are, accepting what is as what must be and conforming to that, rather than forging one’s own reaction and one’s own path. One of the most fun lines in the song (ones which I’m sure must make Neil Peart very satisfied with his cleverness), encapsulates this very well: “An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure.” The line that it is riffing off of is “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and the idea is that one’s own clear sight is worth far more than anything less genuine. Indeed, the general falseness of the norm means that it is more likely to obscure than illuminate. We give in to the norm perhaps because the alternative is too difficult, or one has been worn down—the lines in the chorus that go, “A tired mind become a shape shifter”—so we choose to adopt the shape of another rather one’s own because it is easier.

But again, it is important to remember that genuineness is not the same as purity or self-enclosure: mediation and mixing here represent the achievement of an identity rather than its compromise. With recording—and by extension, with life—it is not just a question of what the inputs are, but what you do with them. It is so difficult to balance the function and the form without simply giving in to the norm precisely because that means there is no set answer or formula to follow: mediate too much and form takes over and kills the life that the form is meant to serve. But let the function dominate and without the regulation of form the function cannot be properly fulfilled.

(Surely autotune would be an example of conforming to the worst kind of norm possible in the worst kind of way—certainly it could be said to demonstrates the least amount of “The Spirit of Radio”’s “honesty” were it not for the fact that so much of it is so obvious. In this regard the subtler forms of autotune are perhaps more insidious and dishonest, if perhaps less overtly obnoxious.)

This aside about autotune leads me to the last thing about this song I would like to discuss. Near the end of the song things take a dramatic change musically. At around 3:04 in the album version we get to the “Everybody got mixed feelings,” “Everybody got to deviate / elevate / escalate/ emancipate from the norm” section. The various words that Geddy sings about how we ought to relate to the norm express the variety of issues at stake here. First of all, everyone has to deviate from the norm because the norm is an artificial determination, calculated from a whole field of values, so in this regard the whole idea of "Unstable condition, a symptom of life" that this song begins with holds true (for an interested recap of where our current obsession with the idea of the norm and the average see this article). But the other phrasings Geddy uses mark a particular kind of normative determination to deviate from the norm by rising above and getting free of it. This side of it connects to Rush's general nonconformity insofar as the idea is to be guided by what really matters rather than what is reflected in some external or artificial notion like that of the norm.

And to return to the music, these ideas receive a really amazing musical exposition. The opening to this is marked by a great bass solo and a scattering of really cool bass fills in the album version while the guitar plays some great atmospheric chords against a heavenly (I don’t know the term here) synth. Coupled with the lyrics it gives the song a really triumphant and transcendent ending. But as great it is on the album the live versions are immensely superior. Gems like the versions of the song from the 1984 “Grace Under Pressure” tour and the 2002 “Vapor Trails” tour (the song was actually recorded in Quebec but its bundled with “Rush in Rio”), are one of the reasons why I think Rush sells so many live records. Their album versions are fantastic and enormously difficult on their own, but the band pulls them off beautifully live (the many versions of “Bravado” are worth checking out).

Anyway, these live versions of “Vital Signs” really shine in this final section. Here is the “Grace Under Pressure” version:

The final section begins around 3:10, and certainly Geddy shows off his bass chops there. But what’s really special to me are the great guitar fills that Alex inserts everywhere. You can hear him start layering the notes at 3:22, and he continues to do some really beautiful playing through 3:46 in particular. Meanwhile, Geddy’s voice is, as some of the commenters on the video note, really in fine form—not quite as high as it is in the 70s but still very strong.

But as much as I like that version, the “Vapor Trails”/ “Rush in Rio” version is the definitive one to me. Now, I’ve had to link to a recording of the entire “Rush in Rio” album because the cut of just the song isn’t on Youtube, but it’s just a matter of finding the song at the very end, starting at 2:55:08

The sound of this “Vital Signs” is really robust—when Geddy sings “Leave out the fiction. / The fact is this friction / Will only be worn by persistence. / Leave out conditions. / Courageous convictions / Will drag this dream into existence,” you can hear the will behind it. But what really shines is the final section of the song, beginning at 2:58:18. First of all, I love Geddy’s exclamation of “Hoo ha” there, I always mentally insert it into every other version of the song that I hear. But again, what really shines is the guitar work starting at 2:58:35. I just love it. Listen and maybe you can make an ounce of perception out of the pound of obscure I’m serving up here.

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.