The opening scene is, well, of an adult nature; I’m an adult, and I remember how Star Trek: Enterprise had Jolene Blalock in skivvies for the male gaze, 100% - but this was a scene with no nudity but in flagrante dilecto. We know people in the Star Trek universe are people, but this was gratuitous… and long. There was a payoff in the scene - no, not that kind of payoff, geez - but it could have been done differently and without … whatever that was.
And the story in the episode - which wasn’t sex at all - suggests that the galaxy is a few days’ wide… and yet has enforceable “shipping lanes.”
I have no idea why nobody in the writer’s room looked at “Hey, let’s get someone whose location is presently unknown on the scene in 15 minutes” and “he wants control over a shipping lane between two similarly-named celestial objects, implying that they’re close” without going “are these not gross contradictions?”
And then they tried to pretend these people had unique insight (“Hey, they don’t like light!” - not the observation, but similar; if it’s that trivial, it’d be super trivial to diagnose, like “oh we can defeat Dracula by using a light bulb, woo”) and the power to use so-much-si-col-uh-gee to play games with others’ heads. This is basic “hey, do we have a tricorder” stuff, even if they try to “help” by mysteriously blocking communication because why not, it’s convenient for the story.
This is episode six, guys. You shouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel this early. At all.
]]>That’s the engine of the franchise at its best: posit a condition, then follow it honestly. What if a rock were a person? What would the fleet do if no medical personnel were present in an emergency? What if a society’s entire value system were built on logic - or violence? The best Trek stories don’t just pose these questions — they engage with them. With rigor. ST:A poses them constantly and then flinches from, well, most of them.
What the show could have done with Jay-den alone - a pacifist queer-coded Klingon in an endangered civilization - is dig into the real tension: his societal role should be to propagate the species and its culture, but his apparent preferences lie elsewhere. Every ultra-conservative father with a son who plays with dolls would understand that storyline; every ultra-liberal would understand the pressures to conform and maybe see why those pressures exist. That kind of conflict builds bridges, and that’s what the Star Trek franchise has always done best when it cared to try.
The Chancellor - Ake - has the same “she’s always right” writing that sank Discovery’s later seasons - Michael Burnham approaching every conflict with the Power of Pure Empathy and Maybe A Tear or Two - but Holly Hunter’s performance keeps it from collapsing. So far.
Mir, her student and foil, is Wesley Crusher, part eight: effortlessly competent at everything, which raises the obvious question - if this super-fit super-genius hacks electronic personalities for breakfast from school, how did he end up on the wrong side of the law? But at least Mir has internal conflict. At least he’s learning. The central dramatic pairing works because the writers gave them a story worth exploring.
What if an authority felt betrayed by her own responsibilities, and her charge escaped into horrible circumstances, only to be reunited later, when the authority could actually help him as she’d intended? That’s a little far-fetched, but … this is Star Trek. We accept living rocks and warp drives, phaser pistols and transporters. We’re okay with far-fetched if it can make us think.
The supporting cast is where the show invokes institutional logic it can’t support. The War College is presented as a rival institution with no institutional identity beyond “not the Academy.” The Academy itself asks no hard questions about what it means to train officers in a post-war, post-collapse Federation: it’s presented as a grand challenge but we… see no challenge, no building, no struggle, no messes. These are set pieces cosplaying as structures, and they convert every participant into a caricature from a script, not a character who deserves or demands engagement.
The War College cadets are felt cutouts, but the deeper failure is structural: they’re in a rivalry with the Academy without clear winning conditions. But they’re warriors! Sun Tzu should reign supreme, in concept if not named outright. They don’t set a desired outcome, so of course they lose. They’re meatheads written like meatheads, utterly unsympathetic, and the conflict they represent diminishes the show. Even their self-centeredness feels scripted.
They’re the writer room sneering at the hands that supposedly keep the wolves at bay, in a setting where ST:Discovery even showed us the wolves. In other Star Treks, the galaxy had mostly progressed beyond such simple things, but not here. Here, the setting has explicitly regressed. The War College is mandatory and important and … well… a prop.
We’re supposed to see them as foils to the “good guys” at the Academy, but they have no fangs. They serve as interservice rivals without the necessary merit to justify the rivalry. An antagonist with no winning condition isn’t an antagonist; they’re furniture.
SAM is a “photonic” individual - a solid-ish hologram. Star Trek has covered uncertain identity from our perspective before: the Horta, the Doctor (a character in this show, even!), and Data. But those explorations worked because they imposed constraints that generated drama. SAM floats in the show without material limits: she goes to bars with the rest of the Scooby Gang, she has feelings, she has a quirky episode. But what she doesn’t have is a coherent account of why she’s a person, and without that, her identity is decorative.
She’s presented as a student at the Academy, but the show never engages with the obvious questions: if she’s software, where’s her hardware? How does she learn? Why does she learn, and why here? (Why not anywhere sentient beings happen to congregate? Why not a market?) She has a responsibility to be an emissary for “her people” - other sentient holograms - and to understand “organics,” but without communicating what “understanding” would mean. I think personally it’d be pretty simple: survival and propagation. Photonics wouldn’t understand that well, I’d imagine, and that’d be where the learning was. (“Why do they do all that … interacting, rather than just copying a file and starting a routine? Strange, very strange. And they need to eat, you say?”)
And then the show tries to ask an actual question about her: how is she even an individual? In her feature episode, Mir alters her code to try to help her on her journeys. But the implications of rewriting someone’s being are treated as a plot device, not a philosophical crisis. If she’s an individual, Mir just literally changed who she was, and that’s… no. That question about individuality and responsibility is fantastic and they not only whiffed on it, they hid from it, and honestly, made it worse. After all, why wouldn’t Mir change her to be more of a Barbie doll if he could? She wouldn’t even have to know what her “before-self” was! … yeah, exactly. Ew.
The episode ends up evoking DS9 to say “See, we remember quality” without actually embedding any of it. If everyone in this universe idolized Sisko, why didn’t everyone actually idolize Sisko? Why is canon reverence significant for one episode and absent from the show’s DNA otherwise? Why are they so selective? Sisko can be a hero - but they have hundreds of years’ worth of heroes to choose from. If they’re going to point at one, they’d better defend why, better than “this is a name the audience will recognize, go team.”
And now we get to the real problem - and what it implies about the show as a whole.
One of the students, Jay-den, looks like a Klingon. He may even speak Klingon. But he’s a Klingon Who Does Not Do Klingon Things, and in a culture defined by participation - by honor rituals, by the hunt, by combat - opting out isn’t dissent. It’s departure. Maybe it’s even worse: capture.
Jay-den was raised in a very primitive setting - cookfires, woods, primitive shelters - in, well, a nontraditional family unit. Klingon culture is canonically dyadic and monogamous; their mating rituals are approved by matriarchs, and based on equal pairings, explicitly. The primitive part is fine: QoNoS has been destroyed, and the Klingons are endangered as a species and as a culture.
But Jay-den’s family is two fathers and one mother - which is doable, under some pretty extreme circumstances - but would absolutely represent a negative outcome with some really, really bad implications: namely, Klingon women are gone and the population growth is very negative. This isn’t a dying culture: this is a culture that’s got its toes over the edge and it’s looking down.
But any show that invokes extinction without showing adaptive brutality is cheating itself and its viewers. That they did not show the costs of survival implies the writers are lazy, uninformed, or so invested in culture war issues that they’d rather consign Klingons to extinction than make sense… and along the way, they’re ignoring what could be a story worth telling.
There’s a hunt scene, representing a manhood ritual, that exemplifies the problem. Jay-den refuses to participate - not failing performatively, but refusing. His father takes him “through the rite” anyway and intentionally misses the kill, an oblique gesture of acceptance. But if you want your son accepted within the culture, the kill has to happen. In fact, the son has to do it. The father didn’t just accept his son’s departure from the system; he subverted the ritual itself, lying to - whom? Himself? Jay-den? The entire community? He had the option to even symbolically complete the rite - corrupting it, even so, but at least it would be completed - and chose not to, hollowing out the ceremony from within.
As a member of a culture with such participation rituals, I was offended. Greatly. That’d be like a father incorrectly reciting a son’s oaths, just because the son didn’t want to, but then the son claims the benefits of having taken those oaths. Utter betrayal on every level.
Again: the Klingons in this setting are critically endangered, maybe even past “critical” given the family structure we’re shown. Their homeworld has been destroyed, civilization in diaspora, clinging to tradition as an anthropological survival mechanism - because that’s how cultures work when they’re dying. In that context, Jay-den’s pacifism and his apparent attraction to non-Klingon males aren’t just personal choices; they’re an advocacy for the Klingons to be referred to in past tense only.
The show doesn’t engage with this. Jay-den demands respect for Klingon culture while rejecting its defining practices. He defends his people through debate but doesn’t respect the value system he’s defending. (Meanwhile, every Trekkie is expecting him to debate with Bat’leth in full swing. He’s a Klingon, for goodness’ sake!) His societal role in a dying population is unclear, and the only logical reading the show offers is accidentally ugly: that his identity makes him unfit for propagation, enough to cull him from the herd. That can’t be what the writers intended, but it’s what the worldbuilding implies when you follow it honestly.
They tried to say “this is a better way” using a story that said “this character is unfit for survival” in the anthropological sense.
Every living being has a survival imperative, and cultures receive a Jungian shadow of that. Jay-den is portrayed as opting out of the cultural imperatives, but they gave him narrative freedom to do so, and that’s not how those societies work. The contract we watchers have with Klingon culture is being violated, and that’s fine, unless it’s implicit. And it is.
Their hands are writing stories that are unable to tell themselves. And that’s a sin.
]]>I got a new guitar: The TOD10N, my third Ibanez ever (after my first electric, an RG440, and my AG86 archtop). This is also the first nylon-string guitar I’ve ever bought for myself - I’ve had nylon-string guitars before, but they were hand-me-downs that I didn’t take very seriously, very much guitars where people thought things like, “You like guitars, I have this thing I found, why don’t you take it?”
This one’s interesting: it’s very much a hybrid design. Nylon strings, wound like a classical or Spanish guitar, but with a fretboard radius (i.e., slightly rounded) like an electric - plus it’s a thinline body, so it’s hollow but shaped like an electric guitar, and it’s got pickups and a standard output jack.
It’s probably ideal for someone like me: I don’t play classical guitar, but I like the responsiveness of the nylons.
Stringing it is a pain, and I’m not sure I’m doing it properly yet. I don’t know if the strings just take a long time to settle in, or if I wound them poorly; I restrung it with Henson’s custom gauge (“it’s better for electric guitarists, since it’s a light custom gauge”) and I don’t know if I should have chosen a more standard gauge, or if I should just expect that my first restring is done as if it’s the first time I’ve ever restrung a nylon-string guitar. Maybe both.
It’s fun integrating it, though; it’s a very percussive guitar (nylon strings!) and I’m discovering that my right hand isn’t as good at fingerpicking as I’d like it to be. It’s good to know, if jarring. The guitar’s soundscape is definitely taking some getting used to; I’m used to using lots of vibrato and sustain in my playing, so having a guitar that resists heavy vibrato and emphasizes the initial attack of the strings is quite fun. Challenging, but fun.
Not a lot else, although I have some things in the works, I think. Not enough developed there to talk or write about, but hey, it’s there.
Incidentally, I love my Ibanez guitars - it’s wierd, because I’m a little bit of a snob when it comes to Ibanez, but every Ibanez I’ve ever had has been excellent.
That RG440 was my daily driver, the first guitar I ever bought for myself - yes, my first guitar had a Floyd Rose on it - and it lost value when I replaced the original Floyd Rose, and the installation was slightly offcenter. The intonation on the guitar never recovered. (I didn’t do the installation; just an accident of history, I think.) The guitar was finally lost forever in a fire.
The AG86 - which is in my small collection today - is one of the best sounding guitars I have. It’s not quite easy to play - floating bridge, and the strings are very sensitive - but it’s a joy to use. (I don’t have a problem playing it - if you’re heavy-handed as a guitarist, it tends to go sharp very quickly, but I’m not exactly one who squeezes the neck as he plays.) It’s a comfortable guitar with beautiful sound.
And now the TOD10N joins the set of Ibanez guitars I’ve owned, and I’m happy for it.
]]>It doesn’t replace the joy of Hanukkah; that’s something you and your family should experience, a kindling of hope and survival in a world that works for nothing but your eventual passing. Hanukkah says “even now we survive,” no matter what your circumstances, and that’s worth celebrating.
But I wanted to put it on my site anyway, to replicate the sensation of survival even in this medium.
L’chaim!
]]>“You can’t stop the signal.”
Philosopher Marshall McLuhan had an expression, “the medium is the message,” in “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” (He apparently also came up with “global village” and predicted the World Wide Web a long time before it came into being: the things you learn doing basic research!) Anyway, “the medium is the message” refers to how the channel of communication shapes human experience more than whatever content travels through it. Television rewires us whether we watch the news or a dead channel. The form is the thing.
But McLuhan was talking about macro-structures: print versus broadcast, hot media versus cold. Tiktok or Instagram against Reddit, maybe. The way a message was communicated affected the message: to see the same thing expressed over television and in text was to see two different messages even if the content was the same.
But, reader who may not realize what I’ve just done because you haven’t read further yet: I think there’s a related and distinct message as well, at the level of the utterance itself. It’s all doors, if you want to open them. The reading - the inhalation - is its own communiqué, a word I learned for a spelling bee and never used in competition, even though it became one of my favorite words because I am ridiculous.
Pardon my own self-observation, here, I’m clearly unbiased about myself, but: I have been known to encode multiple layers of meaning in most of my content. I have a message - the intent of what I say or write or, well, whatever - but I also layer meaning in how I communicate that message. I think I do this to keep myself interested and engaged, or to unconsciously flex, or maybe because I’ve forgotten how to be any other way, how to be simple anymore.
I can say “I like dogs” in a way that’s very simple - I do like dogs - but the way I say it says something about me, my mood, my audience, the form in which it’s communicated. The level of effort I put into saying it means something, my specific phrasing adds layers that go beyond the simple statement. The statement is a message. The medium in which that statement exists is also a message, often but not always related, possibly isolated for those who wish to see it.
It makes communicating both fun and terribly difficult, often obscure and confusing, and very occasionally highly enlightening for both me and my interlocutors.
For example, should I say something like, “I am speaking very seriously now, for real,” that phrase is doing multiple things simultaneously:
Most people seem to treat the first function as primary. The signal is scaffolding; you look past it to reach the content. The phrase disappears once it’s done its job. McLuhan might say the medium affects how you integrate it, and how it might change you, but the medium is part of the message. I say they’re distinct but related.
The scaffolding that helps create the building is itself architecture. The frame is part of the painting, and changing the frame changes the painting.
The conventional model for communication treats form as a vehicle for content. You have something to say; you find words to carry it; you find a medium to place it within. The words are successful as much as they become invisible and let the meaning through. The words are, for the most part, the payload: the way it’s said, who said it, their tone, their specific phrasing, their caveats… all subservient to the words, and meaning is all.
I think … differently. I use words as art, precisely, as cudgels and scalpels, as veneer and bone, innately; it’s a defense mechanism from being embedded in a subtly hostile culture that sought to mutate who I was and am, even for my benefit. I built armor using thought and deed and phrasing, to allow me to be myself around those who wanted me to be a constant and a target and an audience, because iron was too honest and silence too naked, too inert. I could not be in a world where I was either a threat or a victim. I long to be neither. I refuse to be either.
And when I say I use words as art, I use art as words, too: when I write music, I choose pieces and parts and modes and rhythms to create the same kind of modus, where the music serves the point of the music, and the point of the music creates its own words, even if it’s not apparent on the surface.
I learned to layer meaning because simple things can be possessed, can be taken away, punished, misunderstood on purpose. I say things where misunderstanding becomes its own message, where possession is not possible because there’s nothing constant to hold. It all spirals, looping back on itself, being. All of it. Like water, or music, or prayers, or stories, or me, as I am a part in my own play.
I think Shakespeare had it right and wrong: “All the world’s indeed a stage, and we are merely players, each another’s audience inside the gilded cage,” as misquoted by Rush in “Limelight” - and yes, we are. But we are also our own audience, and that matters.
Thus, form and content work together, they’re synergistic - and not in the buzzword bingo sense. The word means something, after all! But the medium, the signal is itself, and what it carries is also itself, and the two amplify each other. Neither is ancillary. Neither is primary. They’re only hierarchical as much as the receiver needs them to be.
I like making jokes for myself - I’ll follow discussions about semiotics and meta-epistemology with phrases like “I like big words!” It’s not just self-deprecation wrapped around humility. (Although it is self-deprecation wrapped around humility, something I’m rather proud of.) But it’s a thing said, with its own weight, doing work alongside and with the humility it might seem to merely contain or reference, even as it demeans that humility in the process of expressing it.
First off, it might mean that I could be horribly exhausting to try to keep up with, as a reader. I really do try to write in ways that can be understood clearly on multiple levels, for the surface readers and the readers who might be going “Hey, wait, what does that really mean,” for the second level of perception, and then those readers who look at the second level and think “Hey, now, there’s another level here, what the heck,” and so forth and so on, until I’m going “What did I mean by that? I better ask an AI. They’ll get it wrong, but it’ll be funny.”
Second, though, is this: If the medium used for a message is as much art as the message itself, then:
tab key to accept an autocorrection by accident. I done fixed it.)McLuhan gave us permission to see the channel as significant, even if we were unaware of anything he’d said. The extension for me is seeing the utterance itself - each one, individually - as significant in the same way. Not a pointer to meaning, but meaning. Not a vehicle, but also a destination, often intertwined with the message itself, but not always. I can say more than one thing in a given statement, given opportunity and intent, and I often do, even if I’m the only one who might understand myself in that moment.
That’s okay, because I, too, am the audience, and I speak to myself and instruct myself as I speak and interact with any other reader.
Of course, explaining this is itself an utterance. This essay is a signal carrying content about signals carrying content. The form of the explanation participates in what’s being explained. It’s turtles all the way down - an endless, infinitely deep fractal that refers to itself in both the first and the third person. As if it had a personality of its own and no supervising editor, that is.
Which means it can’t just describe the thing. It has to be the thing, or it’s lying by omission. This whole essay has been an experiment in self-reference, a way of expressing something in such a way that the expression says what itself is, and it’s as demonstrative as I can make it.
Whether it succeeds is a question the reader answers by how they read it - whether they look through these words or at them, whether the scaffolding disappears or stays visible as architecture. If you see the framework, well, you win - and if you don’t, well, you still win, and that’s okay. I see it, so there’s a victory, no matter what happens. This is how I survive myself, both in daily endurance and beyond this mortal coil.
You can’t stop the signal.
]]>I hope I die like a cat
Accepting
Fighting with my last breath
Content with the outcome
And not like a fish
Reacting
Uncaring
Unfeeling
Consumed.
I’d like to present my thoughts on a resurgence by Rush, one that really shouldn’t exist: the last two studio albums by Rush, where they really recaptured the form they’d had in their “classic years,” the period from 1976 through 1982.
To understand what I mean by “resurgence,” let me state as an assertion that Rush had two periods where their creativity was absolutely fantastic, and most of their musical efforts were bang on, both commercially (well, for what that term means to Rush, which means “earns gold records or better, and gets listened to for decades”) and creatively.
The first period was from “Fly By Night” through “Signals,” roughly 1974 through 1982, with “Caress of Steel” being the one “miss” in the entire period. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a good album, and it has advocates (“Caress of Steel was their best album!!1!11”) but I think from a commercial and artistic (and historical) view, it had good offerings and it reached for the stars… but wasn’t the equal of the albums that preceded and followed it. (In other words: sure, it was good, but “Fly By Night” and “2112” were both better, and I really don’t think most people would argue against that assertion.)
The second period where their creative and commercial acumen were really on point was with “Snakes and Arrows” and “Clockwork Angels.” I’d include “Vapor Trails” in this group, because I love that album, but I think the band was still trying to rediscover what it mean to be Rush for this album, and I think some of the things that drove the previous six or seven albums influenced Vapor Trails too much.
“Ah,” my astute readers are saying to themselves: “What are some of those things that influenced Vapor Trails?”
I’m thrilled you asked, astute readers! I praise your astutitude to the sky! (And I think “astutitude” is a made up word, but I’m running with it because it makes me laugh.)
One of the things that I think hurt the “middle period” of Rush - “Grace Under Pressure” through “Test For Echo” - was the nature of the music industry itself… and us, the fans.
Back in the early days, back when men were men, women were women, and small furry creatures grooving with Picts were small furry creatures grooving with Picts, the music industry was driven by a combination of artistry and, for lack of a better word, “money.” And “money” is the best word, because it’s the right one. But we can’t leave “artistry” out, because commercial viability was a giant aspect of what drove music, but individuality was, too.
If you sounded exactly like (some successful band’s name here), that was great, but you had an uphill climb ahead of you, because if people wanted to listen to the successful band, well, why wouldn’t they just listen to that band instead of yours? You had to differentiate yourself somehow. If you sounded unique but didn’t sell, well, the music industry wasn’t a charity; why would they shovel money in your direction? (Answer: they wouldn’t.)
When Rush really hit their stride, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the gold record was the standard: you toured like mad because you wanted your albums to sell, and that’s how you paid off the advances and earned royalties on music.
The point was that you wanted people to buy your albums.
But in the 1980s, something changed. At some point the money changed, and bands started having to rely on different revenue streams. Instead of touring to sell albums so they could make money, bands toured to get people to attend their concerts, and that is where they made the money; selling albums was important, because it got people to attend concerts, but it became almost (almost!) a secondary goal.
But the primary revenue stream, where the bands themselves saw the most profit, was the concert. If your tour went well, you did well; the album royalties paled by comparison.
In this environment, Rush did very well for themselves, because Rush’s fanbase is rabid, in the most positive sense, with many fans seeing the band multiple times on each tour.
The effect, though, was a touch corrosive: albums took a back seat in priorities, and the album contents changed, too.
Rush was still Rush, so they still pushed themselves to sound unique and do new things on each album (play me one bar from any song and I can tell you what album it comes from, I think) but… realistically, every song had this sheen that spoke to how it would play in a live context.
This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, and it gave us a lot of great moments from those seven or eight albums. The tours went fantastically, generally speaking. Everyone benefitted.
But the albums… they felt slightly like market campaigns, seasoned with art as expression.
My resentment of “Feedback” is fueled by this, I think. To me, “Feedback” was the “Hey, can we put together an R30 tour in short order?” album; I think it’s done about as well as such an effort could be done, but it still suffers from the corruption of being driven by a desire to tour. I don’t resent the band for leveraging its stage popularity and skill, and I’d far rather they have given us an album (as they did) rather than a cynical “Hey, let’s tour with nothing to support,” but “Feedback” was artistically abortive. It was Rush playing through someone else’s songs, not Rush really showing us anything new.
That leads us up to “Snakes and Arrows.” This album feels to me like Rush finally got back to a feeling they had in the early 1980s: “We’ve done it all, we don’t NEED to do anything for people to attend our concerts, why don’t we do stuff that we want to do, say things we want to say?”
So you had playful scherzos like “The Larger Bowl” and “Hope” on the album, outliers in the larger Rush catalog… except outliers like these have proud precedents like “Different Strings,” “Broon’s Bane,” and “Losing It.” Rush sounded like they kept the momentum from albums like “Test for Echo” and “Vapor Trails,” but the sense and feeling was different, more artistic, more internally driven…
It felt less driven by “who would attend a show that featured these songs” and more driven by “Wait, we’re Rush, we can play bloody well anything we like.” Fans would buy the albums and attend the shows, after all, and true fans were likely to appreciate what Rush had laid before them.
“Clockwork Angels,” too, had the same devil-may-care approach. You can see it with “BU2B2,” “Halo Effect,” and “The Garden” - among others. They’re songs that are good songs - but not necessarily crowd-pleasing songs, unless the crowd in question is predisposed to being pleased by those songs.
And since the songs were great in the context of the album, the crowds WERE predisposed to enjoying those songs. It’s a self-fulfilling process.
But it’s one that I don’t think Rush was necessarily managing as well as it could have, for a stretch of six, maybe seven, studio albums. When they hit “Snakes and Arrows,” they returned to “art as expression,” and recaptured MY imagination, at the very least.
Thanks for reading, if you endured with me for this long!
I wrote this originally as a pure retrospective, looking back on a band’s career as a static, finished thing. It ain’t done, y’all… and I can’t help but wonder and marvel at the idea of what Rush might do, even if it’s only on stage, with nothing left to prove, no ghosts to answer, and able and willing to look both forward and back with knowledge and impunity… and ownership.
]]>Someone on a thread on drums made a comment to me, saying “What was Neil doing with all those (extra drums)?!”
Well… if you’re going to ask, I’m going to think about an answer!
The TL;DR version, for people who like to skim: “Playing them, of course. Playing zem all. All of zem. Bwahahaha!”
But as a drummer and an overthinker, that’s … not enough to satisfy me.
Really, if you don’t like to read, you have already read the important parts. Move along. I appreciate the “didn’t read all them thar words” comments, because they’re hilarious, but… seriously, don’t worry about it. I overthink. I know it. You can tell it. If it’s not interesting to you, THAT doesn’t interest ME, either, and any commentary is wasted and I don’t want to waste your time or my own.
Okay, so what WAS Neil doing with all those drums?! He really didn’t need them; after all, he recorded Fly By Night on what we would think was a paltry kit today (a six piece, I think, an early iteration of Chromey?) and apparently Malignant Narcissism, on Snakes and Arrows, was at least written on a four-piece kit, a lot like the kit shown in https://www.facebook.com/…/pfbid02mzs7BqLnzGeGHD14Lx4tq… (where you’ll find the original comment, actually.) And Neil played on a smaller kit for the NHL theme he did for them, and in the Buddy Rich tribute as well.
So I think it’s safe tp say that it came down to approach, and not need.
Drums are hard. A lot of drummers .. there are a lot of approaches to drums. When I was thinking about it, Aerosmith came to mind: early Aerosmith, the good version, had a drummer who played like he was interested. Not only did he hold down the beat, he played the beat. Later Aerosmith - when they came back from irrelevancy thanks to Run D.M.C. - felt different. Those drums might as well have been programmed. They held down the tempo. They filled in space in the mix. They were dull. Oom. Ka. Oom. Ka. Oom. Ka. Oom. Ka…. that was the whole song.
You can do that, if you are a great drummer. Charlie Watts and Ringo Starr - tell them to play four on the floor, and you have a SONG. Nothing against Watts, who I mention here because he WAS a great drummer, RIP - but Starr could play a simple four count and make it sing. (You can tell a poser drummer by their opinion of Starr; “Starr wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles!” is a neon sign saying someone has no idea how to play the drums, but MAY have a lot of grandiose ideas about how to play fills. Sadly, such drummers are ALSO typically massive fans of Peart, not understanding how the drums work.)
Drums don’t only hold the beat. They hold the heartbeat of a song. They have their very own phrasing, and it’s typically represented by syncopation, as opposed to melody. It’s an approach to a song in terms of time, not pitch and timbre… usually. And the masters of the drums control time very well. Starr and Watts didn’t have massive kits, but they had those tickers in their heads that allowed them to control the song based on the passage of time. You can do that with a two-piece kit. Check out Vulfpeck; they do that all the time in their music.
And then we get to people like Peart. I really don’t know who started the “massive drum kit” movement; it wasn’t Neil. The first guy I remember hearing about in terms of the size of his kit was Peter Criss, from KISS, and to be honest, THAT sounded like showmanship: I’ve never heard Criss actually play that monster kit, only show it.
Peart, though… Rush was a three-piece, and the thing about three-pieces is that they typically SOUND like three-pieces. There’s a lot of room to fill, and you have to construct songs around it. You could do like the Who - which had four members, but three musicians - and use the studio and extra musicians on stage to fill in parts (a very standard approach, and there’s nothing wrong with it) - or the Police, and write very sparse music where the three musicians are providing things that hang in air to make a single whole thing.
Or you could do what Rush did, and say “Sure, we’re a three piece, but we’re not gonna sound like it. We want six parts in this section. Alex and Geddy can play guitars and foot pedals, Neil can play the bells and the drums. Geddy, you sing here, too.”
They were playing all out. Do a chart of the different pieces involved in a lot of their songs - especially once they hit their stride, around Permanent Waves - and playing live becomes a dance. “For this section, I will play these notes here and here, and in the ‘and’ I’m going to sing this at that note, and after the second ‘here’ I’m going to hit that note on the MIDI pedal with my right foot, and set up to switch to keyboards over there…”
… and we wonder why Geddy didn’t look like he had a lot of fun playing a certain era of songs, until the technology grew up enough to make it doable without driving himself nuts! It’s no wonder he had a rep as a bit of a control freak for a while - I can imagine that it was his refuge against all that madness.
Back to Neil and all those drums! Peart didn’t just play the beat, he played a melodic role, too. And giving him pieces to play with - crotales, a cowbell tree, all those toms, cymbals with different lengths and pitches, the bells, the gong, the glockenspiel, the .. the… the.. ALL OF IT GOLLY IT NEVER STOPS
All of that gave him a melodic playground to help fill in the gaps, because Rush never really LET us say “well, it’s okay, they’re only a three-piece.” They always filled in all of that space in the right way, such that we never felt that they needed to apologize for being only a three-piece. (And for a lot of listeners, they can’t even TELL. A lot of people are amazed: “That’s… three people? On stage?”)
So: did Neil NEED all of those drums? … I’m going to go with “nah,” especially after Gruber’s tutelage, where his drumming did fundamentally change - Peart had a tendency to play the beat and the fill, almost as separate parts, but Gruber changed Peart’s approach such that he played the drums as more complete phrases. (Technically it didn’t change much, but the way the parts were written were more organic, in my opinion.) But his note selection was still very broad, and very capable. He didn’t NEED all the drums, but he sure knew how to play them such that we could appreciate that he had them.
]]>Oh, Professor.
Neil Peart was in my opinion one of the most influential drummers ever. To me, he lives in a pantheon with few others: Buddy Rich, Max Roach, John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr… there might be a few others who can aspire to his level of influence, but not many.
Here’s the thing, though: I think it comes down to influence.
On Rush Fanatics and in other groups, you see memes about it: “Drummers use metronomes! Metronomes use Neil Peart!,” for example. But that’s… not right. You also see comments about groove and Peart’s lack of it. That’s… not right either.
Let’s be fair, here, good and bad.
Peart was a freaking awesome drummer. I don’t know of any other way to put it; even if his incredibly busy, heavy style wasn’t your taste, it doesn’t take much to recognize how good he really was.
Someone might easily prefer Bonzo’s approach, or Ringo’s approach, to the skins, but choosing Bonham over Peart is almost purely a matter of taste: you like Zeppelin’s more open-handed approach to style more than you do Rush’s more technical process. On a tactical level, or a skill level, you’re really looking at half a dozen for one, six of the other.
On a technical level, I don’t know of a drummer who’s nudged more percussionists in different directions than Peart, especially when you consider the duties he took on later in Rush’s career. It used to be that Geddy and Alex would trigger samples from synthesizers, but as technology marched on, you saw Peart “playing” synthesizer as much as Geddy Lee, using his MalletKat or other pads to trigger events seamlessly on stage.
He was also incredibly dextrous and I can’t imagine how strong he must have been to hit the kit as hard as he did, night after night, for hours on end. Listening to him live, you were always waiting for those moments when he abandoned the recorded material and absolutely went for it on the drums, leaving the audience going “… wha… where did… THAT … come from?”
But let’s also be honest: he was NOT a machine, NOT a metronome. He missed hits just like the worst of us, although certainly it was rare… even on live albums there were rolls he’d skip out on every now and then, like the snare ruffle in Tom Sawyer, when Geddy sings, “But change is!,” or the high hat riff he does in the instrumental opening Xanadu - sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not.
Plus, his timing has NEVER been as robotic as people claim.
Look, I’ve done covers of Rush; I’ve done Animate, Closer to the Heart, Analog Kid, Distant Early Warning, and Red Sector A. I used real drums for Closer to the Heart, and programmed percussion for the others.
The first thing you do when you program drums for something like that is you do tempo detection.
The tempo on those songs - even for Animate and Red Sector A, which was done with a sequencer for timing - is variable. It’s generally constant - if memory serves, Animate was in the vicinity of 114.25 beats per minute, but it varied from measure to measure anywhere from 112 to 120 bpm. Red Sector A wasn’t much different.
You heard that live, too, where the band could (and did) speed up and slow down sections of songs from night to night - and sometimes corrected speed even DURING a section.
(There’s a lot that goes into this; it might be that Alex was playing slower or faster that night, and the others matched his speed if he wasn’t going to match THEIRS. It’s not a criticism, just an observation that we’re not talking about an inflexible robot behind the kit.)
The point is that as a musician, Peart was more influential than inaccessible… and that’s a good thing, because it keeps him human and understandable and reachable and entirely admirable.
RIP, Professor.
]]>TL:DR; I have found myself thinking that the lyrics between P/G and T4E were … less satisfying than the other eras of Rush, and I don’t know WHY. I have suppositions, and analyzing the lyrics from a technical perspective yields little… but this is something that I was thinking about “Manhattan Project.” Short version: I think Peart didn’t bother presenting why the project existed well at all, and chose the easy path of “I don’t like that it existed,” even though it’s written well and is performed masterfully.
I was thinking this morning about a song by Rush (yes, I am a nerd), and a related conclusion is that pacifism is a LOT easier when you’re on the side that has a better chance of winning any given conflict.
The song was “Manhattan Project,” from “Power Windows,” and I find that lyrically it’s one of the weaker Rush albums, although the music tends to be pure fire from that period, if it’s your thing. (That was the beginning of Rush’s real “synth era” and relied very heavily on technology.) Like another song from the album, “Territories,” it lacks understanding and empathy, instead choosing populist’s approach of “bombs are bad, how tragic that we used the technology to kill,” although that’s a poor paraphrase.
It’s really written more like a ballad than “Territories” is, and I think it bothers me less because of that; it’s really trying to characterize the process rather than criticize it, but some of the characterization is overly simple, saying that the project was trying to “build the best big stick” to “turn the winning trick,” regardless of the impact such a drastic increase in power would have.
But is that really fair to the motivations of the project? It really isn’t; when you’re faced with existential threats (which is how the Axis presented itself, and how the Allies perceived the Axis, regardless of what hindsight would say about either one), what is the right response?
Pacifists would say to find some way to coexist, I suppose, at best; true pacifists say that they’re willing to die for their cause, I suppose? (I haven’t been able to verify this; when pressed, they seem to place the responsibility of their survival on people who don’t share their views. Apparently, it’s okay for someone unidentified to carry the gun, although it’s wrong to do so? And they get offended when you press the issue, so … I’m guessing, honestly.)
But being willing to surrender, with coexistence the best outcome, is no way to survive. In game theory, that’s a losing proposition, with the best possible outcome a short survival.
Why? Because nobody would have any reason to choose your pacifist strategy over a more aggressive one; the aggressive strategy can’t lose to your strategy, because you’re unwilling to fight back. The only ways an aggressive strategy can lose are:
Note the lack of “from external causes, as peace and flowers fill the air and cause the aggressors to just stop, because why wouldn’t they?” - that’s a fine dream, but I’m unaware of it occurring in history, ever. The other three happen; even the least of them has happened in history (and in recent history, too!) but that’s a recent phenomenon.
In most cases throughout mankind’s record of itself, aggression has fallen only to more aggression, applied with greater force in some way: overwhelming power, or better strategy at war. That’s how you guarantee a win, because hoping the other side collapses before you lose is heavily reliant on the will of your opponent; if they have a will to win, you’re dead unless you fight back better than they do.
The Manhattan Project existed under that framework: we were in a war, we had a possibility for an overwhelming weapon against which our opponents could not defend except by developing their own similar weapon (and we concentrated efforts to prevent them from doing so). The scientists weren’t just sitting around, going, “Hey, Bill - wouldn’t it be neat to spend a significant portion of our GDP on something that goes, like, KABLOOEY, except bigger? … and the sunsets! They’d be awesome!”
And that’s what I think “Manhattan Project” presents - the scientists as shortsighted and warlike gnomes, tinkering about to create a tool without thinking about the possible consequences. (The portrayal of Paul Tibbets, Jr., flying away from Hiroshima, is well-done in the song, in my opinion.) There may have been some such people - in particular those who betrayed the US to share weapon information with the USSR - but even they may have been motivated by some sense of ethics, to create a counterbalance against overwhelming US power.
In the end, the Manhattan Project may have upended the notion of world power, creating a set of superpowers who may or may not have held the wisdom to use such power well… but to characterize the enactors trivially demeans both the author and the listeners.
]]>