Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class Dreaming in Middleton [Paperback]

Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. In this book, Chris McDonald assesses the bands impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. McDonald explores the ways in which Rushs critique of suburban lifeand its strategies for escapereflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties, while its performances manifested the dialectic in prog rock between discipline and austerity, and the desire for spectacle and excess. The bands reception reflected the internal struggles of the middle class over cultural status. Critics cavalierly dismissed, or apologetically praised, Rushs music for its middlebrow leanings. McDonald's wide-ranging musical and cultural analysis sheds light on one of the most successful and enduring rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.

As Chris McDonald correctly points out in Dreaming in Middletown, writing on rock music traditionally has tended to privilege the working class as the ultimate site of authentic expression. It is refreshing to encounter a scholarly book that finally takes up the challenge of interpreting popular musics meanings in relation to its substantial, yet often neglected, middle class fan base. Deftly interweaving in-depth musical analyses with the insights of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, and the voices of Rush fans themselves, McDonald has produced a smart, probing, and illuminating scholarly work that deserves a place alongside Susan Fasts In the Houses of the Holy as one of the best musicological studies of a single rock band.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Anywhere But Here : Rush and Suburban Desires for Escape
2. Swimming Against the Stream : Individualism and Middle-Class Subjectivity in Rush
3. The Work of Gifted Hands : Professionalism and Virtuosity in Rush's Style
4. Experience to Extremes : Discipline, Detachment, and Excess in Rush
5. Reflected in Another Pair of Eyes : Representations of Rush Fandom
6. Scoffing lÃÄ