Neil Peart 

I know this will come off as indiscreet. Speak well of the dead, goes the admonishment. Yet, as the tributes pour in for Neil Peart, dead yesterday of brain cancer, I find myself surprised by the widespread willingness to sing the praises of this particular drummer and lyricist. Alan Greenspan, notwithstanding, no one has better promoted the wicked worldview of Ayn Rand than did Peart. Via the lyrics he plugged into Geddy Lee’s Muppetian falsetto, Peart regurgitated the vile vomit of Rand’s so-called “Objectivism,” draped in the shimmery adornment of dystopian futurism. Randian me-firstist discourse is, of course, the cornerstone of the neoliberal revolution that took hold under Reagan and Thatcher but which now infects nearly every aspect of our media, our values, our law, legislation, and “reason.”

Rand’s philosophy make sense as fodder for a music aimed at teenage boys, answering to the narcissistic mandates of pubescence and the demands of Western, waged “manhood.” All selfishness and bootstrapping, Peart’s lyrics paint a picture of a world dependent on the freedom inherent in individual choice-making. (Exhibit A: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,” from the song “Freewill” on the 1980 album Permanent Waves.) Conveniently, it ignores all the implicit and explicit limitations imposed on individual’s choices due to gender, race, and class. In this respect, Rush’s lyrical worldview bears a decided resemblance to the legislative worldview of conservative lawmakers and to the economic worldview of free marketeers. This is no coincidence. Peart’s thinking shares a bloodline with those whose faces would adorn the Mount Rushmore of the not-so hypothetical hyper-patriarchal United States of AynRandica: Milton Friedman, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Ryan, Clarence Thomas. (Bless their stars that the Randians can plausibly nominate a Black man to provide convenient cover for objectivism’s endemic White supremacism.)

Some point out that Peart later dismissed his infatuation with Rand, telling Rolling Stone, “That was forty years ago. But it was important to me at the time in a transition of finding myself and having faith that what I believed was worthwhile." Unfortunately, the damage was done. Literally millions of teenage boys – turned on by Rush’s mixture of power balladry and proggy semi-sophistication, and by Peart’s machine-tooled percussive excess, perfectly composed to be mimed on the dashboards of anything from a tricked-out Trans Am to your mom’s Malibu Station wagon – were introduced to objectivism by Peart (notably via his liner notes to Rush’s 1976 album, 2112, which cite “the genius of Ayn Rand”).

And, still, there are those of us who cling to the fusty belief that, quite apart from the drummer’s intentions, art actually *means* something. We maintain that in the workings of the work, the comings-together of means and method, the collisions of reference and rationale, something emerges that says something, does something, feels like something. Art must take responsibility for this something. And, while one might be tempted to say that the artist, in turn, must take responsibility for the art, I don’t think that’s quite right. Because, as Barthes informed us fifty years ago (plus two), the artist is wholly a product of the art. Not the other way around. Whatever Neil Peart is to us, he is an effect of Rush’s music. Despite all disavowals, Rush’s music always hewed to a particular conception of mastery, expertise, and sophistication (but not too much sophistication – for god’s sake, it’s not King Crimson).

Remember back in 2012, when Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President, tapped Paul Ryan, throwback-conservative congressman from Wisconsin, as his Vice Presidential running mate? Remember when Ryan confessed to cranking Rage Against The Machine while pumping iron? Remember when Rage’s guitarist, Tom Morello, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone, condemning Ryan and asserting that Ryan was, in essence, a bad listener for misapprehending the meaning of Rage’s music? What’s at issue in this musicological debate is the question of how music makes its meaning. Morello says, listen to the lyrics, dude. He wonders which songs are Ryan’s favorites, “Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of ‘Fuck the Police’? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!” For his part, Ryan says he likes the music, but not the lyrics. The thing about Rush is that, regardless of whether you’re a Morellist or a Ryanian, you’re in a pickle. If you attempt to move past Peart’s Fascile (facile-Fascist) wordsmithing, you’re confronted, unfortunately, with the problem that is Rush’s music.

And here we are forced to realize that, even if forty years ago, Rand was left in Peart’s motorcycle’s rearview mirror, Rush as a musical entity has never separated itself from the core principles of an objectivist worldview. Rush’s music represents a valorizing of technique, as embodied in technical apparatus and virtuosity upon such apparatus. Exhibit B: Neil Peart’s drum kit:

Some drummers play with their bodies. Some play with their brains. (The best combine the two. See the Rock and Roll Eulogy for ClydeStubblefield and Jaki Liebezeit, February, 2017.) Neil Peart plays with his arms. As my friend, Seth Brodsky, quipped, this is “biceptual music,” music of and for the biceps. Like Rage Against The Machine, it’s music for dumbbells. What we marvel at when we marvel at Peart’s playing, is what he can do with his limbs. His drum kit tells us this before he even sits down. Peart’s kit is a text. It reads: “So many things to strike! Imagine this man’s limbs engaging all these objects!” One wonders how he decides that he needs one more piece? That small black cymbal over his left shoulder, for instance? Does Peart lie awake at night, tormented by the fact that his kit presents nothing for him to hit that will produce a frequency of 2600 Hz, sustaining for 6 to 8 seconds? Yes, he does! And that is the source of our techno-obsessive wonder.

Like his kit, Peart’s playing is everywhere-all-at-once. Nary a crevice or fissure in the cliff face of Lee’s bass or Alex Lifeson’s guitar is left unspackled by the daubs and baubles of Peart’s multitudinous double kick drum, his demisemihemiquavers, his flams and paradiddles. Again, the listener’s ear is mesmerized by the techne-dextrousness with which Peart’s spatial detection software tracks down unfilled musical space and pimps it like a Medieval Catholic architect. The meaning of Rush’s music is distilled most eloquently, most unadulteratedly in Peart’s playing. His rototom fills and China crash crashes speak directly to the sinew of the adolescent boy, to the muscle he is so desperate to acquire. The adolescent boy has been taught that this muscle is the key to his happiness and, more importantly, to his self-fulfillment: that is, to the fulfillment of his individuality within the heterogeneous tangle of society. Peart’s are the biceps that launched a thousand Guitar Center drum solos. Peart’s playing is all assertion. It asserts its mastery, its virility, its self-certainty. It is not above stepping clubfootedly on the toes of Peart’s bandmates, just as Rand’s *playing* was not above stepping on others’ shoulders – or heads – to get where it was going.

Again, I realize this will offend some who relish their developmental memories of pummeling the dashboard to “Tom Sawyer” on the Motorola radio. I would never dream of denying you those memories. But development suggests progress, moving beyond the shallow, immediate needs of the moment, to broader sensitivities. Rush’s music and Peart’s playing did not avail themselves of stepping back from visceral responses. Like the objectivist impulses that inform the music, their songs don’t make time or space for reevaluation and realization. Still in the thrall of Rand, Peart wrote the lyrics to “Anthem” on 1975’s Fly By Night.

Live for yourself
There's no one else more worth living for
Begging hands and bleeding hearts
Will only cry out for more

Morellian or Ryanian, the analyses don’t yield much in the way of benevolence. With self-serving autocrats occupying presidential palaces from Brasilia to Washington to Moscow, with an alternative ideology suddenly and realistically available at the highest levels of U.S. government, mourning the passing of Peart’s music feels like an indulgence none of us deserve.