The 2000 album Neil Peart said sounded perfect: “A masterpiece”
The number one rule when interacting with Neil Peart was always about seeing the man behind the legend.
Anyone would have considered him one of the greatest drummers of all time if they saw him play for two seconds, but Peart wanted to be known like any other working musician rather than some god among men. He was just as interested in listening to all kinds of music and discussing drumming techniques, but it was going to take something major to really catch his ear back in the day.
After all, the biggest names in prog got there because of how ambitious they were, and what Peart did required a lot more than just a bunch of guys onstage playing songs. Rush’s music was all about pushing the limits on every one of their songs, and even if it was too cerebral for what the average rock fan was used to, Peart wasn’t about to apologise, either. He grew up listening to Buddy Rich and John Bonham, so he wasn’t going to spend his entire career keeping time.
But when you listen to Rush’s greatest records, it’s not all about them flexing their musical chops at all times. Peart still wanted to focus on the song at the heart of every one of their recordings, and that meant building the arrangements around it. That kind of approach may have been a little contentious during their synth period, but it’s not like they changed their way of songwriting or anything.
The quality of the tunes was still there, but even if Grace Under Pressure didn’t have as many massive guitar breaks or anything, it was about creating a collage of sounds. The band were young enough to still be fans of what the new school was doing, so there was no reason for them not to pull from bands like The Police, even if it did mean making some truly heinous fashion choices whenever they got onstage.
By the time they reached the 1990s, though, they were pretty much a dad rock band. Their songs were still complex and everything, but they weren’t trying to break new ground, the same new ground that they had done back in the day. They had reached their final form in lots of ways, but that didn’t mean that Peart couldn’t still find new musical revolutionaries whenever he turned on the radio.
The charts may have been dominated by the biggest names in nu-metal, but Peart could still admit that Linkin Park made a cutting-edge record with Hybrid Theory, saying, “Linkin Park’s first record, Hybrid Theory, in 2000, had been hugely successful commercially, and, for this listener, musically as well, bringing together heavy guitar riffing and rock rhythms, vocals ranging from pop melody to metal screaming, and an ultra-modern hip-hop influence of turntable scratching, sampling, and rap-style verses and backing vocals. A modern masterpiece, I felt.”
That might sound a bit crazy, but when you look at how Mike Shinoda arranged everything, it wasn’t all that different from how Peart looked at music. He was trying to create musical landscapes the same way that the nu-metal hopefuls were back in the day, and when you look at their later records, Peart wasn’t afraid to try out some new things when going back to his roots on records like Snakes and Arrows.
Thankfully, we were spared hearing any of the band members’ rap again, but Peart didn’t want to discount what a band like Linkin Park brought to the world. There were a lot of people around that time talking about how rock had lost its edge, but Peart knew that artists like Shinoda were going to be able to take the genre and turn it into something a lot more ambitious, the more they experimented.
