The one genre Neil Peart said was too boring to play: “I can’t imagine it’s very exciting”
Neil Peart wasn’t the kind of drummer who was going to lay down a simple groove every single time he played with Rush.
He signed up to play progressive rock, and while the Canadian trio had started out being one big tribute to bands like Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie, there was no doubt that they were changing the lines from the minute that the needle hit the grooves on Fly By Night. Peart was leading the charge from the back of the stage, but even if he was prepared for anything, he knew that there were some genres that he wanted to avoid whenever he walked into the studio.
Then again, Peart was the one saying that there was no idea that didn’t suit Rush from the moment he joined. Nothing was off the table as long as they felt that they could add something new to their arsenal, but by the time that they had become a traditional classic rock band by the 1990s, there’s a good chance that they would have looked like absolute buffoons if they had tried working in genres like nu-metal into their music whenever they started making records like Vapor Trails.
Because, really, Rush had already known the pitfalls of working with rap back when they started working on Roll the Bones. The album itself is among one of their most underrated works, but since the actual song features a pitched-down Geddy Lee rapping his way through such stunning bars as ‘gonna kick some gluteus max’, chances are they weren’t necessarily going to thrive in the era of Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis.
Even if they did manage to find a way to do some mammoth crossover, though, where the hell would they have even fit in? Sure, a band like Primus was getting big around the same time and even had some production help from Durst when working on some of their heavier tunes like ‘Lacquerhead’, but if you’re focusing on a Rush record, you were going to need to be a little bit more forceful on the drums than what Peart was hearing.
Those bands could definitely play, but Peart felt that laying down a hip-hop groove wasn’t what he saw himself doing, saying, “I enjoy the music, but I’m not hearing a lot of interesting drumming lately. Limp Bizkit and those types of bands are not really drummers’ music from a player’s point of view. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe there are other examples that I’m not familiar with, but when I hear that music that’s the one thing that occurs to me. I can’t imagine it’s very exciting to be a drummer in a band like that.”
At the same time, there were some bands just on the horizon that were making far more interesting music than what the traditional nu-metal acts were doing. Sure, a band like Korn were only going to be relying on the 808s a lot of the time, but when Slipknot debuted, Joey Jordison was a natural percussion god, almost like he was trying to fill the void between heavy metal, progressive rock, and even some of the technical virtuosos like Stewart Copeland.
And it’s not like Rush wasn’t able to take some influence from other sources around this time. ‘Malignant Narcissism’ is still one of their traditional rock and roll instrumentals, but the fact that they thought enough to have a slight tip of the hat to Trey Parker and Matt Stone was one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments that they could have made during the latter half of their career.
But even if Peart was more interested in hearing what some of his favourite drummers from his youth could do, there would still be people out there willing to wow a crowd whenever they got behind the kit. It wasn’t going to be found in nu-metal by any stretch, but we were only a few years away from seeing Travis Barker become one of the greatest modern masters of the drum kit.
