Rush- 2112 (1976)

For years I resisted anything that had the slightest whiff of "prog"- after all, my mental image of the genre as I understood it was Jethro Tull doing silly bollocks with flutes and Rick Wakeman faffing about pretentiously with ostentatious keyboards. More to the point, this was the dragon punk was supposed to have slain, and thereby saved us all.

What's more, the main thing I knew about Rush before I started properly listening to them was that drummer Neil Peart, while extremely talented, was once an acolyte of the loathsome Ayn Rand, whose half-baked books are sadly devoured by morons to this day. He disavowed such youthful folly decades ago, of course, but sadly this album manages the awkward combination of being a superb artistic achievement with propagandising Objectivism and, while I cannot dispute the band's freedom of speech- I abhor censorship except, as put by John Stuart Mill (a proper political philosopher unlike the very stupid Rand), where it is tantamount to shouting "fire" in a crowded building where there is no such conflagration- neither can I get myself to like this album, much as I have to admit it's very good- and I certainly find it easy to like other albums by Rush.

I must admit, though, that my youthful prejudices against “prog” were, well, lacking nuance. Rush, for example, are not Yes. This is straight head rock music which, while hardly composed of three words, has excellent song structure and is not that different from a lot of “post punk”.

Perhaps soon I’ll blog a Rush album that isn’t in large part about morally repugnant right wing bollocks...