Consultancy Rock
The solace of sociological distance in the music of Rush
by Rob Horning
Certain rock groups persist as their own subgenre. The venerable Canadian band Rush is one of them, maintaining a legion of loyalists willing to stick with them as they release album after blandly titled album — Power Windows, Presto, Test for Echo — that defiantly sell in the millions despite little mainstream notice or media excitement. Like the devotees of other cult bands (Phish, Dave Matthews Band, etc.), Rush fans seem to believe that ostentatious musicianship excuses indistinguishable songs — that tracks from, say, Rush’s 1993 grunge disc Counterparts are somehow over the heads of ordinary music fans rather than simply being inaccessibly boring.
But maybe the Rush cult is right. Though the band’s music often belatedly reflects rock trends, Rush seems to deliberately exist outside the hype cycle and the desperation it fosters in listeners who try to keep up with it or, worse, direct it. Bands and songs can easily become phonemes in a musical-taste language meant to express cultural capital. Unreflexive music consumers — if such people can even exist in a Spotify universe — may not be invested in the status games that often enshroud pop music, but their listening habits are still shaped by the zeitgeist, which constrains what is possible and what gets circulated. The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone.
How did Rush get there, beyond irony, beyond cool and uncool?
