Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class

Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. In this book, Chris McDonald assesses the bands impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. McDonald explores the ways in which Rushs critique of suburban lifeand its strategies for escapereflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties, while its performances manifested the dialectic in prog rock between discipline and austerity, and the desire for spectacle and excess. The bands reception reflected the internal struggles of the middle class over cultural status. Critics cavalierly dismissed, or apologetically praised, Rushs music for its middlebrow leanings. McDonald's wide-ranging musical and cultural analysis sheds light on one of the most successful and enduring rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.