Colby Cosh on the way Rush responded to the “New Wave” on their 1982 album Signals:
Every Rush fan is presenting his own list of essential tracks this week: unexpectedly I found myself returning over and over again to “Subdivisions,” the opener from Signals (1982). No Rush song ever had a more portentous dividing effect: there are still fans who haven’t forgiven. Moving Pictures had come out in February of 1981, and its sales set up the band for life and beyond. But it was a consciously backward-looking record — the cover is a big clue — and a culmination of Rush’s original identity. Moving Pictures is an affectionate farewell to 11-minute track lengths and science-fiction song lyrics (mostly).
After just a few months came the first 51 seconds of “Subdivisions” — Rush’s own astonishing riposte to the New Wave. A lone synthesizer pulses (in 7/8) for a few seconds and then Neil comes in: no further description is possible or necessary. The passage would make a career calling card for any drummer, but what was novel was the upside-down structure of the song, with Alex Lifeson’s guitar showing up late and then carrying the rhythm (beautifully, if you take the trouble to pick him out) while the drums truly lead the way. This is rare, outside of a drum-solo setting, for any rock drummer not named Moon or Bonham.
It was as if Rush, until then a very loud group fuelled by metaphors of battle, had made a conscious decision to cool down and give the spotlight to its ultimate weapon. Very well, the start of Signals announced, this is the age of the synthesizer and we’re going along with it — but let’s see you S.O.B.s synthesize Neil Peart.
Not coincidentally, Peart’s lyrics for “Subdivisions” also took an artistic step: they shake free of the SF/fantasy tropes and the 1930s poetic conceits he had mostly hidden behind until then. Heard in 2020, the song drags the mind of the listener helplessly back to the moment when “Subdivisions” was on the radio, yet seems to have been written for us to hear now. “Some will sell their dreams for small desires,” Peart warned in a mood of cranky prophecy, “or lose the race to rats …”.
Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons
