Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Rush vs Saga — Classic Rock vs Crap Rock

I grew up on rock music. My par­ents lis­tened to and played many dif­fer­ent kinds of music — some of it was rock music. My father in par­tic­u­lar is a big fan of the Cana­dian rock band, Rush. On a whim, I decided to buy a Rush best-of CD album to lis­ten to some of the classics.

I don’t actu­ally know Rush’s music very well. I haven’t been much of a rock fan until lately, thanks to video games like Gui­tar Hero & Rock Band. After lis­ten­ing to the album a few times, I have to say that I really, really like this music!

It’s rock, no mis­tak­ing it — drums, lead gui­tar, bass gui­tar, and maybe some synth thrown in the mix — but it is so won­der­fully com­plex! Rush’s music is com­plex and takes great skill from all 3 musi­cians. Yet, not only is it com­plex, it is won­der­fully enjoy­able music!

Rush’s songs, from 1974 to 1987 on this album, are clas­sics. They were hits then, and they are still great now.

Hav­ing had so much suc­cess with this lit­tle gem, I decided to buy a Saga best-of CD album. Saga is another one of those clas­sic groups. I had recently heard their song Scratch­ing the Sur­face on the radio and absolutely loved the expe­ri­ence. It was rich, and while not com­plex like Rush, it had a com­pletely dif­fer­ent feel with an eclec­tic mix of sounds and moments within the song itself. I remem­ber say­ing aloud, “This is so much bet­ter than today’s rock music. Today’s rock music is bor­ing crap com­pared to this!”

Indeed, I still stand by that assess­ment. Much of today’s rock, par­tic­u­larly Top 40 rock, is boring-ass crap.

Any­how, back to Saga. I bought the album and upon hear­ing the first 2 tracks, I knew I was in trou­ble. Skip­ping for­ward to my beloved Scratch­ing the Sur­face was the ulti­mate test. Saga had con­verted this pow­er­ful, som­bre piece into a neutered, mel­low, almost folk music piece. It was at least as bad as the other tracks, and pos­si­bly worse because I had so recently heard the orig­i­nal ver­sion of this track.

Maybe the orig­i­nal songs are good but all got crap­pi­fied in this album, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not going to pay money to find out, and for the time being, I have to con­clude that Saga is crap.

Here’s some Rush good­ness to show you what I mean by good stuff:

Okay, I love the music, but I could really do with­out see­ing the ridicu­lous 1970s & 1980s rock out­fits, rock hair & double-guitars!

This stuff takes me back to my child­hood. This is the kind of music I lis­tened to in my par­ents’ car as a lit­tle kid. I know, I’ve been incred­i­bly blessed

How are the Rush guys doing now, years later? These clips are from a con­cert in 2005, 30 years after the release of their first album. Take a look, lis­ten, and let me know if you think these guys still got it!