I’d like to answer this in order to answer to all similar postings here. 2112 was most definitely heavy on Objectivism, but it was only one album. There are definite influences on a few others, but that’s it. Plenty of other albums don’t have much Rand influence after all, so why do people keep on pointing at that particular issue?
It’s like the D&D thing. They must have done, lemme think, no more than a handful of songs with fantasy themes over such a large career, and yet, what do we hear? “They’re D&D nerds”.
Gee, I sound like their greatest fan, and I am not, let me remind you that - I am not a fan at all - but I believe that criticisms should be fair. Much of what critics here and elsewhere say is that Rush has a label or Randites/D&D nerds/whatever, and they won’t bother considering them because of that label. Do you call that fair?
I do call fair the criticisms of people commenting on Geddy Lee’s voice, or on how they don’t like their songs or their composition skills. That means that they did bother to listen to something of what Rush released and formed their own opinion. No beef with that. I don’t like a few hip-hop guys, for example, because I took the bother to listen and only then form a judgement.
I’d also like to comment on the definition of rock as the three-cord style concerned with teen angst, rebellion and lust. Rock started like that, granted, but who said that it should stay like that? it’s like saying that classical music should have remained the entertainment of the princes and therefore we should dump, I dunno, Carl Orff or Modest Mussorgsky. Rock, like classical music, can be used as a means of expressing much more than what they started for, so what’s wrong in doing it? Furthermore, paraphrasing what another doper (sorry, can’t recall who or where) said in some other thread, there’s a limit on how much you can write about going to Fresno to meet with your posse, or how you met that hot girl and rocked with her all night long.
Even if we want to say that music should be entertaining and nothing more, plenty of people get their kicks from Rush, so what’s wrong with that? Nothing wrong in not finding them entertaining either, but it’s not fair to jump from here to “I will pretend they don’t exists” or “I will stick an inadequate label on them and lambast them for that”.