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elfsGrowing up in the late 1970s through the 1980s, I remember listening to Signals by the Canadian rock band Rush and being utterly entranced. Subdivisions was my song, with its refrain:
These days, though, Losing It is much more familiar:
Everyone who does survive finds a reason to make it through adolescence (which is why Birzer's "... kept me alive" is textbook survivor's bias). I found it in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, but everyone finds something. The quality of that something may be a harbinger of one's future, and I'd like to believe that the sexually charged, intellectually challenging, absurdist conspiracy theorizing of Robert Anton Wilson set me on a solid course.
Birzer's magazine is helmed mostly by Catholics, so let's put Rush in the proper context: 1 Corithians 13:11:
Any escape might help to smooth... and to this day, that song is still a cri de coeur of young people everywhere, even if fewer and fewer seem to know what to do with their restlessness, seem unable to escape their phones and explore what it means to be restless in a peripatetic way.
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth
These days, though, Losing It is much more familiar:
The writer stares with glassy eyesThis introspection is why I have a lot of sympathy for Brad Birzer's "How Rush Kept Me Alive," but not as much as you might think. While Signals may have been a damn fine album (and Countdown a damn fine song along with the aforementioned two), far too much of Rush's discography is adolescent, immature twaddle peddling an individualistic view that atomizes us and keeps us apart from one another. Red Barchetta is meant to be a sort of 1984-ish homage, but it turns out instead to be a fantasy of driving too fast, giving The Man the middle finger, and enjoying the rare privilege of driving an environmental disaster. The Trees is Harrison Bergeron with sickly melodrama. Freewill still doesn't answer the question: by what mechanisms do we human being resolve choices? 2112 reads like 1970s dystopian fiction, and that's not a compliment.
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision
Everyone who does survive finds a reason to make it through adolescence (which is why Birzer's "... kept me alive" is textbook survivor's bias). I found it in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, but everyone finds something. The quality of that something may be a harbinger of one's future, and I'd like to believe that the sexually charged, intellectually challenging, absurdist conspiracy theorizing of Robert Anton Wilson set me on a solid course.
Birzer's magazine is helmed mostly by Catholics, so let's put Rush in the proper context: 1 Corithians 13:11:
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.When it comes on the radio, I'll still sing along to Subdivisions. But I won't go out of my way to find it on my phone or CD collection.
