The Rush song about J. Robert Oppenheimer
The atomic bomb had been a source of pop culture fascination long before Christopher Nolan got his hands on Oppenheimer. The Manhattan Project might have been a top-secret affair during its development, but once the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, the entire world was alerted to the awesome power and deadly reality of nuclear weapons.
It’s no surprise, then, that Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart would eventually find inspiration in the project. Peart’s preoccupation with post-apocalyptic worlds was best illustrated in Rush’s 1976 magnum opus 2112, but as he matured as a writer, Peart’s notions of nuclear destruction gravitated from science fiction to science fact.
‘Manhattan Project’, the third track on 1985’s Power Windows, takes an impressionistic look at the titular undertaking, with four verses all accounting for different parts of what eventually became the dropping of the atom bomb. The song’s second verse has allusions to Oppenheimer, but according to Peart, it wasn’t easy for bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee to get his head around the lyrics.
“I wanted the delivery to be like punctuation, and the chorus had to be more passionate and more rhythmically active,” Peart told Bruce Pollock. “It was hard to express exactly how I wanted it. The first time we worked on the music, they had phrased the lyrics in a very slow manner and I had to protest.”
“The phrasing of the line was two short lines and then a long line and two short lines and then a long line,” Peart explained. “There were internal rhymes and internal relationships among the words and within the delivery that had to remain intact for it to make sense at all. It was so carefully crafted that it couldn’t be delivered any old way.”
While Peart worked with Lee to get the song’s phrasing correct, Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson went to work putting music to the song’s story. At that time, Rush was at their most experimental regarding the use of synthesisers, and ‘Manhattan Project’ was no exception. Although they aimed for realistic sound effects, the limitations of technology at the time got in the way.
“Sampling isn’t perfect enough so that you can make it completely realistic – you still can’t get the feel, because digital recording of a sound gives every note pretty well the same value, which you never do when you’re playing a lick,” Lee told Guitar Player magazine in 1986. “On ‘Manhattan Project,’ Andy [Richards] played sort of a fretless-sounding bass line on a Roland JP-8 keyboard synthesizer. It sounded great, so to do it live, we sampled that JP-8 sound into my Emulators.”
“So it worked, but it didn’t work at the same time. I use it live and it sounds okay, but every slide has exactly the same value, which you would never want,” Lee added. “When you play a fretless part, you slide through some notes and pass through others at a different rate. You can’t really do that with a stored sound, unless you have a complex sampling situation where you sample each note differently. So, it has its drawbacks, fortunately for us bass players.”
Check out ‘Manhattan Project’ down below.
