“The divide was stark”: the genre Geddy Lee thought was terrible for music
No rule says that a progressive artist has to have eclectic tastes. Even though the genre was built on musicians looking to take music in different directions, there are only so many times that they can keep up with trends before they start following their own muse and messing around with everything from different time signatures to episodic songs. Geddy Lee could certainly claim to have a well-rounded taste in rock and roll, but he knew one particular genre was a terrible period for music.
At the same time, there is probably a strong contingent of people who claim that Rush came about in one of the worst eras for modern music. Even though artists like the Canadian icons helped open doors for what could be done in rock and roll, the whole point behind punk rock was to stomp out bands like Yes that had turned the genre into scale exercises rather than actual songs.
And it’s not like Rush didn’t fall into that camp from time to time. They still had their knockout singles like ‘Freewill’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’, but looking through their back catalogue, it takes a strong amount of patience to get through a song like ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’, only for the song to be a goofy medieval tale about someone looking for a legendary fountain and realising that he’s wasted his life.
Punk rock may have wiped out that brand of rock and roll, but there was such a thing as going too far the other way, and most fans of Rush wanted nothing to do with disco. Considering everything revolved around the guitar, hearing everything have the same danceable groove on the charts was going to do nothing for someone who would gladly change the beat around three or four times within the span of one song.
Then again, there was more to the story than strictly not liking the music. Although punk rockers like Blondie did manage to toe the line between disco and punk on ‘Rapture’ and ‘Heart of Glass’, there were more than a few undercurrents of racism and homophobia as well, culminating in one of the ugliest nights in music history where a bunch of merry dumbasses set a ballpark on fire in the name of musical hatred.
Those fires have since quelled over the years, but that didn’t necessarily change Lee’s opinion of the genre when getting inducted with Donna Summer, saying, “ This brings back memories of a terrible period of music to me. We were hardcore rockers, and disco was so counter to that. The divide was stark back then between disco and rock.”
Still, there were certain similarities between disco and prog that most people took for granted. For all of those claiming that disco was amateur fluff by DJs, hearing the layers of production on a song like ‘I Feel Love’ is the same mentality that progressive musicians had, only with multiple solo sections instead of that hypnotic groove.
For Lee, though, disco and Rush were a part of two separate ideologies. Even when the Canadian icons eventually unpacked their synthesisers, hearing them take a stab at modern music was still their attempt at pushing forward rather than catering to what the public wanted from them.
