Rush - 2112

And here it is, the album that turned Rush from wooden puppet/donky of childhood into a real boy, it's 2112. Soooo much back story, so little restraint from rambling endlessly about it on my part. 

Yes, their manager really did have to make a special flight and personally convince the execs to give them one more shot before dumping them. Yes, they really did have to flip a coin between playing it safe and going out in a blaze of glory. Yes, they all read an Ayn Rand book one time. It gets complicated. 

So first, the Ayn Rand thing. The novella in question is Anthem, and the credit to the "genius of Ayn Rand" was an attempt to acknowledge the structural similarities between the stories so that they didn't get sued for copyright infringement. We talked about that with Camel and Beastie Boys and Flaming Lips, so i'm not gonna rehash any of it (shameless plug, go buy my 4 books). Also, we aren't talking about The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged or Objectivism itself here, we're talking about the more abstract but much simpler clash between societal conformity and individual creativity. That's what they borrowed, and Neil in particular conceived the whole thing as a kind of Hitchcockian thriller. The story itself is more like Foreigner's "he heard one guitar!..." but he absolutely doesn't succeed to pass his own shadow by the back stage door. It's a bit Orwellian too, if you ask me. Which is odd if you consider Rand's Capitalist Exceptionalism and Orwell's Socialism hanging out together warning of the exact same dystopian future. See what i mean? Complicated. 

First and foremost, we need to understand that what Rand means by "Capitalism" is much more abstract than Marxian Capitalism. You more than likely have a Marxian view of Capitalism in terms of a boss and employees. That is not what Rand means by Capitalism, or rather it is merely 1 manifestation of the morality system of Existence = Truth. Those who deserve to win will win, those who deserve to lose will lose, all exist and all will die. It's a bleak philosophy born out of actually living the completely ironic politico-economic repression i've been writing about over the last 3 years. The America Right has wrapped around the backside of the Klein Bottle and is now traversing Communism backward. 

But I don't want to get bogged down in my usual off the rails type rantathon though, i simply want to point out that she wrote this short story in 1937, 2 years before the official onset of WWII. The illicit action depicted in it, by the way, is "independent scientific research," or as i like to call it, Judas Priesting the oppressive "theocratic fascism" Matt Walsh and his sugar daddy Ben Shapiro love so much now 80+ years later. Our present day use of language, as i have repeatedly argued, is completely anachronistic to any remotely accurate historical contextualization of texts written before about 2001. Again, complicated. 

Like i implied, 2112 is bizarro Juke Box Hero. Rush decided "no, screw pretending to be Greta van Fleet, we're gonna Bon Jovi the hell out of this Emilio Esteves/Lou Diamond Phillips movie. If that means we don't get to make records anymore, then so be it." 3 levels of meta later, Rush sold a crap ton of copies of 2112, they kept going for decades and did a tour where the stage scenery was literally a wall of functioning washing machines, and the artists knew better than everybody how they wanted their future to unfold. I hear tell they had a lot of fun doing it, too. We, however, have the blessed good fortune of listening to 2112 as the cliff-hanger season finale that would make or break Rush, and if you listen to it from that perspective it is absolutely without question one of the greatest albums of all time that you should definitely hear before you die. I mean it, give it its full historic context and hear your brain explode in the middle of listening to it. It's fantastic.