Rush: Working Men   

By The Holland Times Friday 11 December 2009, 11:12

The Canadian power-rock trio Rush may be more important than we ever thought.  Founded in 1968 as a Yardbirds clone, they didn’t record until 1973, and even then it was a cover of the classic Buddy Holly rave-up “Not Fade Away.”  Eventually they arrived at their formula: a glossy, uber-commercial virtuosity marked by Geddy Lee — shrilly wailing high-concept lyrics that smacked more of libertarian science fiction than the romanticism of long-hairs with nothing left to lose—call it Led Zeppelin lite?  For a time, Rush dominated the North American airwaves with teflon tunes that satisfied both the glam-maximalists and the progressive snobs.  The combination of big hair, granny glasses, and navel-gazing solos—Alex Lifeson’s blindingly fast guitar runs and Neil Peart’s interminable bombast on the drums--may have gone out of style, but they never stopped recording and touring, even as disco, punk, new wave, grunge, alt-country, and hip hop passed them by.  Has Rush’s time come again?  After all, the triumph of trash is still a triumph of sorts.  In recent years the band has inspired two doctoral dissertations, eight books, Canadian music awards, and not quite enough articles celebrating their longevity, but their latest release, a “Best of Live” production, is a package that only a terminally backwards-looking big record company could imagine as a way to make money: most of the music on Men at Work is drawn from previously released offerings, albeit DVDs, so little new is on offer.  That may be the whole point: The renditions of epic radio staples like “Limelight,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Spirit of Radio,” and “Tom Sawyer” are terrifyingly familiar and suspiciously likable.  The eight other songs on this disc are also not so much clichéd as the originals on which the clichés are based.  The closet in which we hide our aesthetic skeletons had better be big enough to hold rock and roll dinosaurs.
Available on Atlantic Records