Rock has maybe never known a greater overthinker than Peart - who died this week at age 67 - a player and conceptualist for whom no detail was too minuscule to sweat. But, I’d wager, no more than Peart himself. Like the Neil Peart aesthetic as a whole, the song’s drumming is at once profoundly nerdy and totally exhilarating.Īm I, a die-hard Rush fan of 25-plus years, overthinking the significance of the beat swapping heard on “Subdivisions”? Quite possibly. “Nowhere is the dreamer / Or the misfit so alone,” Lee sings, and Peart’s ever-morphing beats - set against the song’s cyclical, almost lulling form - are that misfit dreamer, railing against conformity, struggling to find a voice in a dreary and oppressive world. “Subdivisions” is an achingly poignant chronicle of the suburban teenager navigating cruel social hierarchies on one side (“In the high school halls / In the shopping malls / Conform or be cast out”) and soul-crushing sameness on the other (“Growing up, it all seems so one-sided / Opinions all provided / The future pre-decided / Detached and subdivided / In the mass production zone”). Realizing what’s going on, you might wonder, is he simply showing off? Tossing out rhythmic Easter eggs for the drum-geek faithful?īut consider the song’s lyrics - written, like those of nearly every Rush song from 1975 on, by Peart himself. The variations continue from there: Verse three (“Drawn like moths, we drift into the city…”) features a cramped pattern interrupted by a weird, jutting fill, while verse four (“Some will sell their dreams for small desires …”) gallops away on a triumphant, slamming snare-kick groove. The second time around (“Growing up it all seems so one-sided…”), he begins with a spare four-on-the-floor bass-drum pulse, then moves (“Opinions all provided…”) to a kind of cyborg James Brown beat - devilishly syncopated and weirdly funky. Then, as Lee sings “in geometric order,” he switches to a busier, more lopsided pattern that almost seems to stumble along. He starts the first one (“Sprawling on the fringes of the city…”) with a humble backbeat. So you might hear it 100 times before you realize what’s going on just underneath the surface: That Neil Peart, the band’s brilliantly obsessive supergenius of a drummer, has gone to the trouble of crafting a different drum part for every single verse. Geddy Lee’s insistent synth riff gives the track - a fan favorite from 1982’s Signals - a muted, almost drone-y quality. “Subdivisions,” one of Rush’s most beloved songs, is also one of their simplest.
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