The Best Rush Album

I suppose anyone reading this knows that my favorite band of all time is Rush, and I pretty much like to love everything that they have done. I find them musically intriguing (as much as an untalented idiot like myself could appreciate the musical aspect), lyrically compelling, and just overall fantastic. I find myself emotionally and intellectually engaging the music, and I think that this is a sign of the true greatness of the band. I know that there are probably a lot of other people who feel similarly, but I am going to make a bold statement of which album of theirs is my favorite.

The best Rush album (according to me) is ... DRUMROLL, PLEASE ... "Counterparts". Of course, if you read my last few blogs, you would already know that answer. The album is simply wonderful. I am not going to attempt to analyze it from a musical perspective, I can't - I simply have no talent in that direction. But I will say that I love every song on that album and whenever I put it on, I listen to the whole thing - I do not think I have ever skipped a song by clicking forward on the CD. I happened to be talking to a friend about this, and he thought that he would listen to and rate all of the Rush albums. I am going to attempt to do the same thing in the next several days. Again, realize that I will rate a song on the overall impression that it makes on me, encompassing lyrics, music, and emotional reaction - if a sad song makes me feel sad, then it is a successful song (like "Losing It" - second to last song on Subdivisions, eh ntt's brain?)

But then I thought, "How should I rate them?", and I immediately answered myself, "Of course, I'll use the same scale I use to grade math problems at school." Let me explain. I have always hated math problems that are worth 4 points and the teacher takes off a point if you screw up a negative sign or make a trivial copy error. This is not to say that those errors are unimportant, I just would like teachers to know the weight that they give a particular problem. In the aforementioned example, if a kid transcribed the problem wrong and a teacher took of 1 point out of four, the teacher is tacitly sending the message that copying the problem correctly is more important than doing the math correctly. The student has achieved a 75% on that problem, a C in most classes in high school, so that transcription error takes someone from excellent to average. That is appropriate if that is what the teacher wants to emphasize, but I think many teachers do not even think that far ahead (even math teachers, for whom the numbers should make the most sense). To counter this I put together the following scale:

90-100% A
85-89 A-
80-84 B+
75-79 B
70-74 B-
65-69 C+
60-64 C
50-59 C-
0-49 F

Each problem on a test is worth 10 points (on rare occasions 5 if the problem doesn't warrant that much weight in the scope of the overall test), and then when I make a point deduction I am completely cognizant of what grade I am giving. For example, if a problem has a trivial mistake with a minus sign, I might take off half a point or a point, and the student still has an A on that problem (9.5 = 95%, 9 = 90%), however in a problem where that negative means direction or decreasing versus increasing rate of change (topics where understanding the implication of the negative are important) dropping a negative could warrant a much greater penalty, like 3 points - taking that problem score from an A to a B-.

So back to Rush. I am going to listen to every song on every album and attempt to rate them all on this scale of 0 to 10. I will then add up the scores, divide by the number of songs, and multiply by 100 to get a percentage score, then make a list of the albums that I like most to the ones I like least, and have the score with it. I may also post how I rate each song, but I am not sure. Keep in mind that I am a huge Rush fan, so I will be as objective as I can in rating my subjective response (kinda silly thought, huh?), but it is unlikely that many songs will receive below a 5.

Just for reference, here are the 18 albums I will be rating. I will not be dealing with live albums (though these are truly masterpieces as well) or the cover-tune album that they did a few years back (again, good covers of songs they loved as kids, but not in the purview of this list). So here are the albums, in the best chronological order I can muster from memory:

• Rush
• Fly by Night
• Caress of Steel
• 2112
• Farewell to Kings
• Hemispheres
• Permanent Waves
• Moving Pictures
• Signals
• Grace Under Pressure
• Power Windows
• Hold Your Fire
• Presto
• Roll the Bones
• Counterparts
• Test for Echo
• Vapor Trails
• Snakes and Arrows

Should be an interesting undertaking (for me, maybe not for you), but at least you won't have to read about politics today.

PS you may have noticed that I do not include Ds in my grade scale - this is because I don't believe in them. They exist mostly to alleviate a teacher's guilt at not having done enough or to avoid the hassle of giving a failing grade to a student. It is my job and the student's job to make sure that s/he knows enough to pass the course. To get an F, you actually have to prove to me that you deserve it. You have to demonstrate to me that you know nothing of the course and you want to do nothing to pass the course. Since I also allow retakes of tests, there is no reason anyone shouldn't pass my course. (I allow retakes because I don't care when you learn it necessarily, I care that you learn it. Of course, to incentivize learning it earlier, there is a maximum of a 70%, a B-, that you can earn on a retake.)