True progressives: why Rush was “too quirky” for hits
If there was a certain science behind what constituted a hit single, there’s a good chance that everyone would be doing it. As time has passed, being able to crack the code on what makes a track catchy and what makes a bomb has changed more than a few times, and artists have been making their trade, trying to find the best way to get songs on the radio. Rush may have had their time flirting with the album charts, but Geddy Lee thinks that the band were beyond the traditional singles market.
Then again, aren’t prog-rock outfits practically allergic to mainstream singles? Pink Floyd had always sculpted their greatest works to be taken in as an album statement, and Yes probably weren’t thinking that the multi-part epic ‘Close to the Edge’ would share time next to the Bee Gees on the singles charts.
That’s not to say Rush didn’t try to have hit singles. For the first few years of their career, the whole reason why they got their first push was because of the success of ‘Working Man’, which resonated with anyone who has ever worked a traditional nine-to-five job in their lives.
When the band got Neil Peart into the group, something definitely changed in their next albums. For the main era that people know them for, Rush was known to pull themselves in different directions and not give a rat’s ass about what the pop trends of the day were, especially when they were making story-driven songs like ‘Xanadu’.
As far as Lee was concerned, the whole appeal of Rush was that they never truly fit neatly into any trends, telling CBC, “We used to joke; we would look at one of the songs that we’d just finished, and we’d say, ‘Hey, that could be a hit — if somebody else did it.’ But we were always too quirky, too rhythmically ambitious, too histrionic in our willingness to add a bit of flash or complexity, and that’s not really conducive to hit singles.”
Since Rush developed a fanbase that was there for progressive music, they were never going to have to worry about making any hit singles. However, that didn’t mean that they would never have a hit on the charts for as long as they lived.
Somewhere around the 1980s, the band’s sound deliberately switched to a more commercial sound, playing with synthesisers and getting huge hits out of albums like Moving Pictures. Once the mainstream had its fill of songs like ‘Limelight’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’, Rush never really went anywhere, continuing to make the same kind of music they always wanted to make while the devotees kept them afloat.
Even when they were past the time when they had to worry about new material, Rush became one of the most well-respected artists in their field, earning the respect of big names like Matt Stone of South Park and Stephen Colbert. While this could have easily been a case of a nostalgia act with a really good PR rep, it goes much further than that.
Rush were never meant to fit into one set structure, and their refusal to rest on their laurels and sell out to the masses has made them one of the most interesting bands of their time. The mainstream may have come to them a long time ago, but Rush’s need to be different from what they had already done is still one of the best examples of staying true to yourself in an industry based on cashing in.
