This month, I’m jumping into the #APlaceInTheSong challenge from @JukeboxJohnny2. Great songs have that special ability to describe places in a way that makes us feel like we’re right there. Each day, I’ll pick a track that I think accomplishes that feat.
In my elementary school years, my parents would take my brother and I to the Pleasantville town library. Thing is, I had no interest in books at the time. But the library had music cassettes that you could borrow. It was inside this library that I discovered one of the most important bands of my journey as a music fan: Rush. The cassette backs were a strange beige. The music was cerebral, mostly guitar-driven, album-oriented, progressive-as-progressive-gets rock. Signals was one of the first albums I devoured – and my favorite track from the album with the spotted dog is the opener, “Subdivisions”.
One of Rush’s synth-heavy tracks, “Subdivisions” feels like a departure from the guitar-first sound the band created for over a decade by the time Signals came around. But not to fret, Alex gets his guitar solo, a proper banger at the 4:20 mark. Lyrically, this is one of my favorite Neil Peart writings. It’s a song of the stark dystopian reality of suburbia. While many of Neil’s lyrics in other songs ruminate over fictitious narratives, “Subdivisions” seemed much more grounded and relatable. A rare gem in the great Rush canon.
“In the high school halls. In the shopping malls. Conform or be cast out. Subdivisions.”