With Rush Back, Has Prog Been Redeemed?

“Growing up, it all seems so one-sided,” once sang Rush's Geddy Lee. “Opinions all provided, the future pre-decided.”

In that song, “Subdivisions,” Lee was addressing stultifying Canadian suburbs. But the same sentiments could apply to his genre. After decades of one-sided opinions, is there a future for prog?

I’ve never been much of a Rush fan—I’ll elaborate a little further down—but part of me is glad the band is being feted and celebrated anew on their first tour without the late Neil Peart. It means that one of the most critically disparaged forms in the history of rock may be receiving an overdue reappraisal.

Other than rap metal and the smooth-dudes style now dubbed yacht rock, it really is difficult to imagine a more excoriated genre than good old progressive rock. A flashback to that time arrived last week, by way of the New York Times: The paper’s obit on the late critic Dave Marsh devoted an entire paragraph to his loathing of prog. In The Last Critic, a new documentary on Robert Christgau, the ever-acerbic Village Voice critic also lashes out at vintage bands given to synthesizers and guitar fugues, making his disgust with it all pretty apparent.

To anyone who’s followed pop trends or rock-critic tastes over the decades, none of this is news. But the Rush revival makes it clear that it’s time for a course correction.

The early years of the form—the first recordings by Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer in particular—truly were progressive. One of the first “box sets” I can recall owning was Superstars of the 70’s, a multi-LP (or multi-8-track) collection from that decade. The compilation was distinguished by the fact that it (a) was advertised on TV, which was utterly the Establishment at the time, and (b) served mainly to plug artists on the Warner, Elektra and Atlantic labels.

Hence tracks by Van Morrison, the Kinks, Roberta Flack, the Eagles, Wilson Pickett, Randy Newman, the Allman Brothers Band and Carly Simon, among others. Very post-freeform FM radio, in other words, but a pivotal part of my early record collection. And among the many songs tucked into that box were Yes’ “Roundabout” and Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man,” both of which I heard for the first time on that collection.

Having grown up on concise hits on Top 40 radio, I wasn’t fully prepared for what I was about to hear. Neither song was like any rock I’d experienced up to that point. “Roundabout” zigged and zagged and felt both grounded and transcendent, and Jon Anderson’s voice was part hippie, part pixie. “Lucky Man” was akin to a British folk ballad—but if the musicians had chanced upon a squealing synthesizer in the mystical woods.

I ventured deep into prog for a while. ELP’s dystopian fantasy “Karn Evil 9” (especially its “second impression”) was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. I even bought Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, since I was a Jules Verne stan as a young reader.

One could argue that the genre peaked in 1974. Could anything get more prog than Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans and Relayer, King Crimson’s Red, ELP’s triple-live album or Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all released that year? When ELP returned from a hiatus in 1977, hauling along an orchestra with catastrophic results, prog was officially done. The arrival of debut albums that year by the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols were the nail in Count Prog’s coffin. (If you look at 1970 as an important date, thanks to Yes’ Time and a Word, debuts from ELP and Gentle Giant and more, the rise and fall of the genre falls into my seven-year theory.)

By then, the genre was fair game for the haters, and not without reason. The bloat that had always threatened to overwhelm prog ran wild like a banshee in a castle. (Okay, I’ll stop with the bad prog lyric jokes.) Asia was no Yes. Offshoots like GTR are forgotten for a reason. Yes’ ’80s comeback, with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” was a parting shot, not a new beginning. The genre had run its course, as things do.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the prog turnaround began. Maybe it was the multi-musician King Crimson tour of 2019, one of the most thunderous shows I’ve seen in the last decade. Maybe it was Robert Fripp’s unexpectedly wacky lockdown videos with wife and singer Toyah Willcox. Maybe it was the accumulated love for Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” (from the Flaming Lips to, sheesh, Kanye West).

Maybe new-gen prog bands like Dream Theater and the Mars Volta made people rethink the music. Maybe those social-media clips, of a guitar-wielding dude trying to impress his girlfriend with prog licks, made others realize how musical prog could be.

Or maybe it’s simply Gen X dude nostalgia, embodied by that Funny or Die skit with Paul Rudd and Jason Segel as obsessed Rush fans who sneak backstage.

And now we’ve arrived at the coronation of Rush.

When I was working on Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley, I learned that the teenage Jeff Buckley was a prog head. He learned how to replicate Steve Howe guitar parts. He and his high school band played Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” at a talent show. A picture disc of Rush’s Hemispheres adorned the wall of his bedroom in Orange County. In his memoir Traveling Music, Peart wrote about discovering that factoid in my book, and I always appreciated him pointing that out.

I’d never taken to Rush the way I had other prog bands. I always found their records too bombastic (even for the style), Lee’s elf-on-helium voice too mosquito-pesky, their sound a little too high-end Journey. Since I’ve always had limited tolerance for Pavement, their quasi-ironic endorsement didn’t sway me either.

Intrigued by Buckley’s Rush love, though, I picked up copies of Hemispheres and Moving Pictures and dug a little deeper into other albums in their catalog. I came away admiring moments here and there, from the riffy “Fly By Night” to the more lyrical “Closer to the Heart.” I could hear why they were a perfect arena prog band, even if I wasn’t completely sold on them.

I haven’t yet seen the band on their much-acclaimed resurrection tour with their new drummer, Anika Nilles. So my personal verdict is still out. But props to them for staying true to themselves and for playing a role in the redemption of prog. At its loftiest, the form aimed to rise above the garage and take us along for the ride. That’s still a goal worth remembering.

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