Tag Archives: review

Rush and Nostalgia for the Future

Posted on by under Life

Growing up I found intense comfort in the music and lyrics of the iconic Canadian band Rush. Rush hold a particular place in the history of rock music, as they were both iconoclastic and unapologetically moral and humanist in orientation. Their songs were not the realm of edge lords or shock rockers. They didn’t make songs about sex, drugs, violence, or stupidity. Much to the contrary. They thought deeply, expressed those thoughts intensely, and were able to stand out in completely unique ways because of the quality of their unified talents.

Rush pioneered rock music as an intellectual pursuit. They were compelling because they stood on principles, and communicated deep commitment to human concerns without couching it in schmaltz. You can sense honesty in their dedication to their musical craft and in the meaning embedded in the lyrics Neil Peart wrote.

John Dewey, a central philosopher of the pragmatist movement, established much of the foundation surrounding art as a moral structure in society. Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t mean propaganda or dogma being used within art to influence or instruct. I mean deeply human values translated into actionable expressions of yearning and awareness.

“Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
Wonders in the world”

–Anthem

In Rush we see full expressions of a world where reason, empathy, and the better angels of our nature have had free reign. We find artifacts proving the best human capacities for love, attention, and hope.

When I think back on what inspired me and what stuck with me for all of these years, I think it is the sense of hope and expectation that they created. Actually, maybe hope is the wrong word… I think yearning might be a better way to describe it. Hope, in a sense, lacks agency. It sees life as something that happens to a person rather than what a person chooses, navigates, or constructs for themselves and alongside others.

“They travel on the road to redemption
A highway out of yesterday, that tomorrow will bring
Like lovers and heroes, birds in the last days of spring
We’re only at home when we’re on the wing
On the wing

We are young
Wandering the face of the Earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we’re only immortal
For a limited time”

–Dreamline

Yearning, on the other hand, is motivational and self-actualization in process. It’s visualization. It’s being the change you want to see in the world. The ability to reflect, imagine the world you want to inhabit, and take real steps to make it real in some way… that’s yearning. It’s the combination of instinct and clear-sighted determination.

-Kramer, on Seinfeld Season 3 Episode 23, ‘The Keys’

In some very real ways, Rush was the soundtrack to my own determination to at least TRY to expand my world. To get educated. To travel. To live as an artist. To read, think, and feel deeply. Songs like Middletown Dreams and Subdivisions called me to broaden my horizons. The lyrics of Dreamline and Ghost of a Chance made me dream, and then helped me transform those dreams into practical plans.

“Dreams flow across the heartland and feeding on the fires
Dreams transport desires
Drive you when you’re down
Dreams transport the ones who need to get out of town, out of town”

–Middletown Dreams

“Like a million little crossroads
Through the back streets of youth
Each time we turn a new corner
A tiny moment of truth”

–Ghost of a Chance

One of the other realms that Rush inspired me to think about and explore more fully was science. As a young person I was exposed to young earth creationism and other forms of science denial. Songs like Natural Science and, later on, Earthshine, prove that transcendent awe and appreciation for the wonders of the universe are not the purview of religious belief. As I read about the science behind everything from evolution to astrophysics, I unlocked a sense of astonishment and pure joy that had not been available to me before. In reading folx with diverse perspectives, from Stephen J Gould and Annie Dillard to Douglas Adams and Ellen Dissanayake, I found that there was a way to be excited about the glories of space, time, and biology without appealing to supernatural explanations. There’s so much that we can see, hear, touch, measure, and practically explore without needing to imagine things outside of the universe to justify them all.

“Wheel within wheels in a spiral array
A pattern so grand and complex
Time after time we lose sight of the way
Our causes can’t see their effects”

–Natural Science

In some way, the feeling that I’ve always had while listening to Rush is a kind of nostalgia for a past dream of a future where good truths prevail. Where the right thing is done, and everyone can see it. Where the light of knowledge is appreciated. Where attempting to understand “life, the universe, and everything” is given the highest of accolades, appreciated more than fleeting beauty or physical ability. Where honesty, good faith, and mutual aid are seen as true societal values. I think that future is possible, and I think we are actually closer to it than we’ve ever been as a species. In a time where this country is divided and anxious, it’s easy to think that future is not possible. But it objectively is. This is the best time to be alive for most human beings.

Click here to hear Jason Pargin talk about this reality

This Thanksgiving week, I’m thankful for the world, for life, for music, and for Rush. Here’s a link to a playlist of some of my favorite songs they’ve made:

Hush to Roar in 1993

Posted on by under Life

Twenty years ago today The Smashing Pumpkins released Siamese Dream, their breakthrough multi-platinum-selling effort.

A month later, on my way to Syracuse, NY to work at the New York State Fair (booth sitting for a basement waterproofing business), I stopped by the newly-built Walmart in Rome and bought the album on cassette.

CassetteSPI think it was the last cassette tape I ever bought, and I think the primary reason I purchased the cassette version was because my step-dad’s late 1980’s Buick Skyhawk had a cassette deck and I didn’t yet have a portable CD player.

I suppose I could wax rhapsodic about the album, take histrionic license in describing how it affected me, or make grand claims of its wider cultural significance. I doubt it needs that kind of support or defense. Just the fact that it still holds water for me after 20 years feels pretty significant when so much cultural flotsam has easily floated away. I’ll try to contain myself.

Yet even after two decades I can still remember some the feelings I had first hearing those songs. I literally caught my breath when Soma, the last song on the first side of the cassette, transformed from hush to roar in my ears that first time. I had been turning the volume up and up and up during that first side, and the quietness of the initial minutes of the track yielding instantly to the guitar blast was awesome to experience with no prior knowledge of what was about to happen.

That pivot – from Soma finishing side 1 and Geek USA opening side 2 – was astounding. I think these two are my quintessential Smashing Pumpkins songs. They both share a kind of binary form where the balance between the hush and the roar is necessary to their emotional content. The stuff that Corgan is talking about in these songs – the existential rush of desire and fear, love and death, meaning and dissolution – requires more than a simple, single movement. So when Soma blows up or Geek USA stills its storm we sense the contours of one man’s deeply-felt reflections.

Here are the lyrics at the key moment between the two movements in Geek USA:

Shot full of diamonds
And a million years
The disappointed disappear
Like they were never here

In a dream
We are connected
Siamese twins
At the wrist

And then I knew we’d been forsaken
Expelled from Paradise
I can’t believe them
When they say that it’s alright

It’s completely appropriate that we find a nod to the album’s title in the whispered words between each half of the song.

The longest track on the album, Silverfuck, takes this ebb-and-flow/hush-to-roar mode to another level, blasting through a ramrod guitar and drum interplay into scintillating psychedelic dreamscapes until pausing for an echoed spoken word intermission only to scream through the huge main theme and spin off in distortion and buzz. It’s exactly the melodrama and bombast that the Pumpkins – a la Billy Corgan – have always stood for.

Siamese Dream is full of great moments sonically and in the sentiments it carries; it’s easy to understand why this album resonated with a generation of teenagers. I don’t know that is truly relevant to my life or emotional state now, but I greatly appreciate the work in aesthetic terms, particularly in the balance and interpolation of big concerns with big sounds. Just a few short years later the Pumpkins would take all of this to a completely cosmic – and semi-psychotic – level on the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness double album. If Mellon Collie represented a serious kind of break from reality, I think it’s clear that Siamese Dream is solidly rooted in reality and felt experience. In it you hear just some conflicted, weird young kids from Chicago trying to carve out a space for their hopes and hide away from their fears. You can see the complexity of these emotions in their performance at The Metro in Chicago on August 14, 1993, which was a CD release event. Click here to watch it.

Or just pick up Siamese Dream and listen closely.

Prometheus

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I’m rating Prometheus a 6.5 out of 10. It was enjoyable but misses in a few main ways:

1) Asking the “big questions” is good. Reducing them to patricide and “hulk-smash!” moments is vapid.
2) Ensemble casts are good. Cluttering up a pretty straightforward plot with idiotic asides and incidental scenes is lame. The ballet David goes on to lace Charlie’s drink with Alien-spawn is great. Charlie’s mood swing is instantaneous and weak. Just way too many off-the-point, less-than-meaningful scenes. The entire dialogue between Vickers and the Captain leading to their tryst “in ten minutes” was groan-inducing. Sometimes too many people is too many people; they could have halved the cast and cut out weak scenes.
3) If you’re going to have an old guy, have an old guy, don’t use horrible face make up. Would have been a PERFECT chance to get super-meta with Peter O’Toole playing the old guy while David watches Lawrence of Arabia to get grooming/speaking tips and be “the good son” to his ailing, deathly maker.
4) Let’s stop hiring Lost writers, ok? We don’t need more “wow, there’s some cool tech” shots and attempts at hip jocularity (wink-wink, nudge-nudge, cue the laugh track, etc, etc); we need potent, meaningful images that resonate with us.
5) When you talk about Ridley Scott making a movie, you have a right to expect at least a 9 out of 10. So while I did enjoy this movie just as a fun sci-fi thing, it’s really hard to be happy with this when we’ve got the man behind Blade Runner and Alien making it. It really should have been so much more.
6) If you want a movie to stand on its own, make it stand on its own. This film requires our knowledge of the Alien franchise… and that makes it thin by itself.
7) It’s awesome how some psycho-sexual fetish paintings from the 1970’s basically made this entire series of movies possible. Go 2D!

All of that said, I enjoyed my time with the movie. The visuals and ships were great, and there were nice moments (almost all of them having to do with David). I did like the attempt to connect with deep yearnings that have motivated humankind for our entire history. It’s not a mistake that we seek to grapple with these issues culturally and personally. We want our art forms to deal with them, too. Those questions and concerns deserve our strongest, best efforts as artists.

And here’s a great review of the film… and another.