When scrolling through social media, I can never resist anything about Rush, my favorite rock band since 1982. This morning I watched a YouTube video in which the band performed “Finding My Way”: a song from Rush’s 1974 self-titled debut album.
Yes, that was more than fifty years ago. Although I was alive, I was too young for Rush in 1974; I was a mere six years old.
The present Rush isn’t the same Rush of my early fandom days. In the early 1980s, Lee and Lifeson were just hitting thirty. Now both men are in their seventies.
Neil Peart, the band’s drummer and chief songwriter, passed away in 2020. (That happened on January 7. I took Neil Peart’s death as an omen of how 2020—and the rest of the 2020s so far—was going to go. I wasn’t mistaken.) Peart has been replaced by German drummer Anika Nilles.
Anika Nilles is a fine drummer, but she had not even been born when Rush’s breakthrough albums came out: 2112 (1976), Moving Pictures (1981) and Signals (1982). In certain online circles, Nilles’s gender has become a point of controversy. Not for me: I have never had any resistance to female musicians. But a part of me must ask: can a Millennial correctly interpret music born in the 1970s and 1980s?
That’s ultimately a silly question, though…and a futile one. Time marches on, and what endures will always be reinterpreted by people who were too young to be there at its inception. In fact, that passing of the generational torch is a requirement for any art that survives over time.
When I first heard Tom Sawyer back in the 1980s, I was struck by that line: “Changes aren’t permanent, but change is”. I of course interpreted that from a teenager’s perspective.
I’m now in my mid—no, late—fifties. Another lesson I’ve learned: If you live long enough, you will see the things and people that you love change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
I won’t pretend that I like this new version of Rush quite as much as the old one. But this version of Rush is more than good enough, considering how much time has passed.
-ET