You all remember Rush, right? They used to be a rock band. But it’s time to order the flowers and start tuning your bagpipes, because that band as you knew it has died.
Geddy and Alex, you see, are endorsing Walmart by letting them use the song “Working Man” in a TV commercial. Walmart, one of the worst employers on Planet Earth, has Rush’s blessing to use its song as a way to help whitewash their appalling record of abusing workers, stealing from honest taxpayers, and paying its own working men and women so little, many of them are on public assistance.
To compound the idiocy, the band has recently claimed to have renounced their collective worship of Libertarian anti-goddess Ayn Rand. But now they show their true colors by jumping in between the sheets with the real-life Galts of the 21st century, the billionaire Walton family of Walmart infamy. These boyos are not on your side, America.
The former rock band Rush has been revealed as a load of profiteering, smirking, exploiting, greedy, manipulative, hypocritical Teabaggers. From this cranky writer to Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, and Neal Peart: your once-proud band is dead, having become nothing more than a propaganda tool for the 1%. The “Working Man” Lee and Lifeson wrote about is being further ground under the heels of the most regressive employers of the modern age while you play chorus to their Dickensian practices, and if there were any justice in this world, he would spit in your sneering, self-absorbed faces.
Rush is dead. The “musicians” of Rush live on, but their band is no more. Let’s all line up to relieve ourselves on Rush’s grave.
Mr. Blunt and Cranky
I couldn’t agree more with this article. I have been a Rush fan since 1976, purchased various vinyl, cassette, CD and DVD copies of their music, seen them in concert on 4 occasions and read every book Neil peart ever wrote, but that ends today. I don’t normally have a problem with older rock groups lending their songs for commercials (though things like stairway to heaven should never be used to sell anything), but Rush has done something here that goes beyond reason. They chose to use their art in a way that devalues that art and insults those who enjoy it.
I’ll say it in “RUSH speak”. “Glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity”……..and “Big money got no soul” Truly distressing to the TRUE RUSH fans who actually listened and heard what they had to say. Selling out to Walmart Is the ultimate sellout! (and no, I has no issue with them selling to VW, I used to look forward to that commercial coming on.)
Been a huge fan for about 26 years since the age of 16. Except for the last one, Seen every tour(some twice) since Presto. My only regret was not being old enough at the time to to know their music or see tour that followed Hemispheres (I was 7). All I could think to myself was… Why in the world would they do that?? I strenuously doubt that they need the money so, ummm ….yea just drew a blank after that. Dumbfounded.