Jack Black explains why Rush boast a timeless catalogue: “There’s a magic to them”
The greatest albums of all time don’t get that position until after the fact. After all, the only reason why someone would want to call something a classic in the first place is when you look back and see how well everything has held up over the years. Although Jack Black has probably seen his fair share of bands that fell out of date, he thought that all of Rush’s work was absolutely timeless.
This is strange, considering that this was the same group that was born out of the progressive rock explosion of the 1970s. Say what you want to about the way that the band operates, but some of their genre-hopping over their career definitely had its fair share of sore spots when you look under the hood.
Take Grace Under Pressure, for example. The entire album is among the strongest efforts that the band ever made, but those squelchy keyboards and dated production tell you this is a 1980s production before you even get past the first three seconds of the opening song. It’s one thing to have timely production, but it doesn’t matter if the songs hold up.
Throughout every piece of Rush’s career, Neil Peart wrote the kind of songs that no one else could have dreamed of making. While the sounds of their more complex songs like ‘Hemispheres’ probably had some chemical assistance to get off the ground, Peart never forgot to put the heart into their songs, either through his own insecurities on ‘Limelight’ or how one treats their fellow man on ‘Closer to the Heart’.
Even though a band like Rush isn’t meant to talk about love very often, some of their best material actually came from their later period when they dissected those kinds of complex emotions. For all of the glitchy keyboard sounds, hearing them talk about the horrors of humanity and the hearts broken in two in ‘Red Sector A’ and ‘Afterimage’ can hit you right in the chest if you’re not careful.
While Black was probably just getting acquainted with the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica when Rush had their time in the sun, he admitted that their music was going to last far longer than any of their peers, telling Beyond the Lighted Stage, “There’s a magic and a coolness to them that continues to this day, and that’s a testament to the music’s power. That’s the only way you know. You check in after 25 years: ‘Is it still resonating?’. Yeah. That’s the only true test. The test of time.”
Although Black’s pursuits with music have been meant to soundtrack some of the funniest moments of the 2000s, it’s not like he sees what he’s doing as beneath what musical gods like Rush can do. The Canadian icons might try their hand at creating prog epics while Black makes rock and roll records about cheap jokes about sex, but as far as he’s concerned, as long as they’re both doing what they love with heart behind it, it’s bound to last for generations to come.
