Let’s get a painful fact out of the way: prog rock is not cool. To the uninitiated, it’s a genre that peaked about 50 years ago, overpopulated with nerds fannying about in capes and playing 25-minute keyboard solos. That is, with one exception.
Rush were never about that shit. The Ontario trio, now regarded as the great prog band of all time and on the cusp of an extremely hyped reunion, never wrote twiddly bits for the sake of it. They started as a primal, forceful, blues rock band, and they didn’t lose any of their oomph as they expanded their vision to write sci-fi epics and technical instrumentals. They had an urgency and seriousness that let them go down, despite the cliches of their genre, as one of the coolest fucking bands to ever do it.
