Was listening to Moving Pictures this afternoon and remembered a conversation I was having with a friend back in what was probably the spring of 1982, when we had just gotten news that Rush's next album was going to be called "Signals". We were sitting at the back of the school bus being driven to our high school, speculating on what the new album might be like. At that point, we hadn't even heard the first single yet, so it was anyone's guess, since Moving Pictures had been such an anomaly compared to anything the band had done before, though still a progression from what they'd started with Permanent Waves. My friend insisted that they were going to go back to writing prog rock and the album would actually be spelled "Cygnals", referring to the Cygnus X-1 saga and there was going to a whole sidelong continuation of it. I highly doubted that because I couldn't see them returning to that mode after releasing PW and MP. I thought that it would be something with more keyboards and technology, referring to the last track on MP; Vital Signs. I said that the last track on each album always seemed to be an indication of where they were going, so I was sure this was going to be way more technical and 'modern' (in terms of Eighties modernity).
Then in August, I heard "New World Man" for the first time on my radio in my bedroom down in the basement. It wasn't anything like Vital Signs and it certainly wasn't like anything from Hemispheres. It was nothing that would have ever have fit in with anything they'd ever done before. Geddy's voice was softer, with no amount of falsetto in it. He was actually just singing. The song was in a jaunty reggae beat that didn't have the raw distorted power of the metal of that day, though the guitar work was dynamic and ever-changing, as could be expected from Alex. It was so different, I couldn't decide what I really felt about it.
When the full album came out in September, I skipped class to go to the mall the very day it was released, which was a tradition I tried to keep for every album afterwards. I went home and listened to it and at first I had no idea what to think. I knew the powerful musicianship was there and so were the intelligent and worldly lyrics. It was still everything I loved about Rush, but it was so weird and new. They had definitely turned a corner with this album and it would take me a while to catch up.
Meanwhile, the friend I'd had that conversation with back before the summer break had ripped his pictures of Rush off the inside of his locker and replaced them with pictures of Eddie Van Halen. He declared that Rush had sold out and he was going with a band that he knew would never let him down...
Such was the divisiveness of that new album back in 1982.
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