Rush are trend-chasers.
This is less a condemnation and more just a statement of timeline fact. A cursory glance at their discography confirms. Their 1974 self-titled debut is a pileup of Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock tunes released nearly a year after Zeppelin's own Houses of the Holy began to move the totemic band away from the sound of that remarkable three-year, four-album run that pretty much defined '70s hard rock; Rush's similarly Zeppelin-influenced sophomore LP, 1975's Fly By Night, came out only one week before Physical Graffiti closed the book definitively on Led Zeppelin's rock years. With their third album, Caress of Steel, also released in '75 [1], Rush began to pivot toward the spacier production and longer compositions of progressive rock, just as bands like Yes and Genesis were beginning their downward spiral after their early-'70s peak and bands like Queen were beginning to test the waters outside of the genre. By the time their fourth album, 2112 came out, the idea of side-long rock suites and sci-fi-epic lyrics were entirely passé. To put it another way, Rush's first four albums follow almost the exact same trajectory as Yes's—two blues-rock-indebted records followed by two increasingly big-idea'd records—only four years later.
This isn't really a critique of Rush; I like Rush (even if I find them much more inspiring as a hard rock band than a prog rock band [more on that later]). And to be fair, Rush's background gives more than enough justification for their place as the caboose of '70s prog—mainly, the fact that there was a whole "pond" separating them from the bubbling progressive rock scene of Great Britain. Believe it or not, the Canadian Rush are the first North American band this article series is covering, and that's not Anglo-centric bias [2]—as far as I'm aware, there's like nothing notably proggy going on in North America during any of the period from 1967-73, unless we're counting Zappa, who quite frankly (ha) seems like a genre of his own. Whereas England generally took psychedelia in otherworldly directions (with proto-freak-folk artists like Vashti Bunyan and, of course, progressive rock), North America seemed to distill the Summer of Love into the polar opposite camps of mostly hippie/post-hippie confessional folk (e.g. Joni Mitchell) and sludgy, jammy roots rock (Neil Young, Grateful Dead). None of America's '60s luminaries or their immediate descendants seemed interested in picking up the psychedelic torch in progressive directions, and it wasn't until 1974, when both Kansas and Rush released their debuts, that North America had much prog momentum.
Which is part of what makes Rush interesting as trend-chasers—they aren't chasing trends in the sense that they're slow on the uptake or opportunists; they (alongside Kansas, though the less said about them, the better) are one of the first second-generation prog groups, bands that arrived at the prog sound not because they breathed the same cultural air and booked the same clubs as the UK proggers but because they heard the established torchbearers of progressive rock and decided they wanted to make music like that. It's essentially the opposite of the '60s British Invasion, and like that earlier transatlantic invasion, Rush's appropriation of UK musical modes both smooths out and regionalizes progressive rock.
2112, though unmistakably proggy, is definitely not British. Casually, the album's six songs bear a lot of similarities to British prog: there's a side-long track about a sci-fi dystopia ("2112"), a song about drugs and Eastern exoticism ("A Passage to Bangkok"), some folksy sentimentality ("Tears"), a philosophical treatise ("Something for Nothing"), and a lot of other prog's usual thematic preoccupations. However, whereas the big UK prog bands are—at least on their major works—all thematically oriented around either mysticism (e.g. Yes) or specifically British class-consciousness (e.g. Genesis), 2112 is anchored by an obsession with the idea of "freedom." The sprawling title track is a suite that basically serves as a Randian parable about free thinkers rebelling against the socialist hell of a "Solar Federation" [3], while the closing track, "Something For Nothing," is full of lines like "You don't get freedom for free" and "What you own is your own kingdom." The members of Rush are well-known as libertarians, and while I suppose there's nothing about libertarianism that makes it off-limits for Europeans, it just doesn't seem like the kind of philosophical proclivity that would pop up on a European prog record; there's just something so "New World" about a prog rock concept album whose concept revolves around the importance of freedom over authority (rather than, say, class struggle or fear of fascism), and, if for nothing else, that makes 2112 important in prog history.
And honestly, there may not be anything else that makes this album important. Look, it's a good album, one that was undoubtedly Rush's most mature and fully realized yet at the time of its release. But it's not an especially innovative record, at least not in the way that this series has normally focused on prog albums as being. 2112 is what prog sounds like when stripped of almost every jazz and avant-garde impulse—it's basically '70s hard rock stretched out to prog song lengths with prog lyrical flourishes. That's nothing against Rush, necessarily; the instrumentation is virtuosic and fun to listen to, and it's clear that these guys know how to rock. But it's also straightforward and unsurprising in a way that's not been true of any of the major prog releases this blog has covered so far. Despite the "Solar Federation" lyrics, this is pretty grounded stuff for prog. It's not really Rush's fault that they arrived at the time they did, at the precise moment the major prog groups were falling into creative decline, but it's hard not to see the relative simplicity of the album as symbolic of the moment when progressive rock's sound ossified into the comfortable and unambitious extension of metal/hard rock that the genre is still having difficulty pushing past.
On the other hand, Rush's relative groundedness and disinterest in psychedelia and mysticism, along with the fact that they arrived when prog's influence was beginning to wane, may have been the best thing about Rush at this point. They, for example, weren't part of the conceptual arms race that eventually pushed Yes to Tales from Topographic Oceans, and neither did they fall into the air-headed hippyisms that made a lot of prog sound so silly once the sonic grandeur began to slip in the mid-'70s [4]. Rush was able to emerge from prog's implosion with basically none of the embarrassments that have marred the reputations of many other prog groups.
What's more, the fact that Rush kept one foot in their hard-rock roots meant that they navigate prog's dicey post-'70s future with a lot more agility than your average prog band. Rush made exactly three full-blown progressive rock albums—2112 in 1976, A Farewell to Kings in 1977 [5], and Hemispheres in 1978 [6]—before they pivoted back into more traditional rock territory with Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures (which you may have heard piecemeal on your local classic rock station), before going full-on synth rock/New Wave in the '80s. This is the same route that Yes and a few other prog mainstays would eventually take, but Rush managed that transition first and was definitely the most graceful in the transition, making their strongest albums in that early '80s period.
Most bands who adopt self-consciously prog attire eventually become either nostalgists or trend-chasers; that's just how it goes. Rush just happened to be good at the latter, whether it be chasing 20-minute prog opus trends or synth-rock ones. It's not a critique; it's a method of survival. And Rush survived. Of all the big prog bands, Rush is the only one to have maintained anything close to mainstream appeal up through the modern age; I may not be over-the-moon about 2112 in the way I've been about some of these other albums, but you're got to admire the band's consistency. It's hard to argue with results.
That's all, folks. I'll see y'all in 1977!
1] The prolificity of rock artists in the '60s and '70s never ceases to astound me.
2] Though the fact that this series hasn't covered any French, German, or Italian bands yet probably is evidence of Anglo-centric bias. It just sucks that pretty much every prog band in the continent of Europe peaked within the same three-year period.
3] Pretty much everyone agrees that this is basically a retelling of Ayn Rand's Anthem, and the liner notes credit "the genius of Ayn Rand" as an inspiration. However, as I'm sure we're all relieved to discover, Rush aren't Objectivists, and they don't even like Ayn Rand anymore, though how the phrase "bleeding heart libertarian" meaningfully distinguishes between Rush and other libertarians is beyond me—I guess they feel bad about not approving of government-aided social safety nets?
4] Though I suppose there's a healthy debate to be had about the silliness of libertarianism.
5] Probably the strongest Rush prog album, honestly, though less historically important (and besides, I have a different '77 album I want to cover next time).
6] Which, for the record, has one of the all-time silliest/best prog album covers.
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