Roland Emmerich has built a career by putting the event in the event movie. His most famous film, Independence Day (1996), set the pattern by giving us Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith thwarting an alien invasion with a Mac laptop (presumably running OS 7) on the Fourth of July. With the exception of an anorexic Godzilla in 1998 and the Mel Gibson colonial gorefest The Patriot in 2000, it’s been all specific dates and times for this guy. Emmerich’s last movie was titled 10,000 B.C. (2008) and the one before that was called The Day After Tomorrow (2004). His latest showcase of computer-generated cataclysms, opening this Friday, is titled 2012 after every pothead’s favorite Mayan prophesy of the end of the world. If only Emmerich had been tapped to helm the recent Friday the 13th remake, then we could have had Jason destroying virtual models of every non-Muslim landmark with tidal waves and lava flows.

However, Emmerich may have gotten a tad too specific with 2012. If by some miracle the world is still here in 2013, blu-ray discs of the movie will seem more dated than Meteor (1979) or even Beyond the Time Barrier (1960). It’s a little like releasing a big-budget, apocalyptic disaster movie called Y2K in the late 1990s and then expecting viewers to sit through USA Network reruns of it in 2002.

One way to give this film an extra century of shelf-life would have been for Emmerich to scrap the whole Mayan-tsunami mishmash altogether and instead make a film adaptation of the rock band Rush’s dystopian, sci-fi album 2112. According to Mercury Records’ ad copy, the first side of the Canadian power trio’s 1976 opus takes us to a time of “Templevision, Megadon, twin moons, atmospheric domes.” While “Rush’s chilling vision” of a 22nd Century where “city and sky merge into a single plane” would give a director like Emmerich plenty to digitally project onto an IMAX screen, 2112 is also more topical than the seemingly more pressing 2012.


In the album’s original gatefold, band lyricist and percussion virtuoso Neil Peart acknowledges “the genius” of libertarian icon Ayn Rand as the inspiration for the future-shock rock opera. Rand has been getting a lot of press lately despite being dead since 1982. Last year’s economic collapse and election of Barrack Obama have created an upsurge of interest among the American right wing in the enigmatic figure that Slate recently described as the “amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers.” Two biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—have just hit the bookstores and South Carolina Governor Mark “Appalachian Trails” Sanford reviewed both of them for Newsweek. Where powerful acolytes of Rand such as Alan Greenspan engineered a global financial meltdown worthy of an Emmerich film (if only the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy could be expressed with CGI), Peart and Rush did the even more impossible by taking Rand’s “One Objective Truth” and making it rock.

Peart joined Rush for their sophomore album Fly by Night (1975), replacing original drummer John Rutsey who left the band for a career in bodybuilding. Bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson had already shown their instrumental prowess on the hard-driving jam Working Man from Rush’s self-titled debut album (1974). By rounding out the trio, Peart made Rush the greatest instructional rock band of all time, a favorite of young rockers struggling to learn licks through music store tablature books for decades to come. Lyrically, Peart steered the band away from party songs about ice-cold beers and casual sex and to a synthesis of Rand and Tolkien that probably would have confounded either author.

2112, the band’s fourth album and Peart’s third, wasn’t the first time that the drummer used Rand as source material. The song Anthem (from Fly by Night) takes its title from Rand’s 1938 novella and its lyrics extol selfishness, Rand’s highest virtue. “Well, I know they've always told you selfishness was wrong,” vocalist Geddy Lee sings in the song’s concluding verse, “Yet it was for me, not you, I came to write this song.” In a shockingly contentious interview with J. Kordosh in the June 1981 issue of Creem, Peart explains, "I think everything I do has Howard Roark in it,” referring to the pissed-off architect of Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) who dynamites his own building rather than compromise its design.

In the novel, Roark sums up his and Rand’s philosophy while representing himself during his trial: “I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.” During the Creem interview, Peart channels Roark in defense of his (Peart’s) devotion to Rand. "It is a life that no amount of money can ever compensate for," Peart explains. "That's why I could never, ever feel guilty about the dollar I earn."

With Peart’s uncanny drumming abilities, it’s not hard to see how Rand’s tyranny of the talented, where the masses are “second-handers” and “inanimate objects,” would appeal to him. As the eighties progressed, Peart enclosed himself within 360 degrees of percussion containing almost every chime, cymbal and roto-tom imaginable, almost as if he needed the extra gear to slow down his thought process in the same way that a speedy computer runs extra scripts to slow down a program so that a normal person can comprehend it. In order to compete, Geddy Lee played both bass and keyboards, often at the same time through a system of pedals. Alex Lifeson, whom Creem described as “the only homo sapien in the group,” seemed to pale next to his band mates, despite his comparable abilities on his instrument.

In the 2112 suite that takes up the first half of the album, Peart delves more deeply into the conflict between the collective and the individual and borrows more from Rand’s Anthem than just its title and ethos. In Rand’s sci-fi parable, global society is run by a World Council that burns people at the stake for the merest trace of individualism or innovation. In 2112, the Earth is under the heel of the “Solar Federation,” which is run by priests who cram equality down everyone’s throats with massive computer banks. Red star banners are also unfurled showing that Peart both overestimated the longevity of the Soviet Union and was oblivious to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years. The Priests of the Temples of Syrinx wouldn’t have needed “great computers” filling their “hallowed halls” but could make the meek inherit the earth through a device no larger than an iPod.

The conflict in 2112 comes when “a man” discovers a guitar and learns how to play it. He shows the guitar to the priests but they smash it like a disapproving Pete Townsend. Instead of “going Galt” like any good libertarian hero, the man kills himself to the strains of a really ripping Alex Lifeson guitar solo. Then, all hell breaks loose if the ballsy crescendos of The Grand Finale are any indicator, but a voice over at the track’s end tells us that the Solar Federation has “assumed control.” The individual fails and collectivism triumphs making one wonder what was going on in 1976 for Peart to pen such a bleak outcome. Maybe he was upset by the successes of Soviet proxies in conflicts on the African continent or perhaps it was the Saskatchewan government’s takeover of the province's potash industry.

2112 was Rush’s first album to go gold and the album cover’s image of a naked guy pressing up against a red pentagram came to represent the band in the same way that inflated lips and a wagging tongue symbolize The Stones. By making the playing of a guitar the central heresy to the Solar Federation of 2112, Peart adds a human element not found in Rand’s writing and connects with Rush’s audience of young musicians in doing so. The priests reject the man’s guitar playing as “just a waste of time” in the same way that many parents discourage their teenaged sons and daughters from wanting to be rock stars. Where Rand’s heroes are belligerent industrial tycoons, Peart’s is an everyman, the listener of the album, the kid cramming himself into an arena to see his/her favorite longhaired rock band. Even when embracing Rand, Peart and company cannot escape hard rock’s populist underpinnings.

My own devotion to Rush occurred when I was 16 and took up the bass guitar. Peart’s liner note urgings even had me reading Rand, but I soon found that cranking up 2112 over and over again on my cheap Capetronics stereo (purchased at Gemco) was a lot more rockin’ than plodding through Atlas Shrugged. By the time I puzzled out the meaning of The Trees from the album Hemispheres (1978), a cautionary tale of the evils of unionizing and trying to level the playing field, I was done with Peart’s politics if not his band’s music. As I watch today’s Randian supermen of the market like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claim to be doing “God’s work” while raking in millions in bonuses and inflating the bubbles of the future, it’s hard not to think that maybe the trees should all be “kept equal by hatchet, axe and saw” (or at least the return of the Glass-Steagall act), even if Peart would disagree.

Despite my ideological disagreements with Peart, I still get the chills when I hear that wicked note bend that kicks off Lifeson’s solo in The Trees or when Lee strums some bass chords during the end of Red Barchetta. I’d also be among the first in line for 2112: The Movie along with scores of math rockers, Guitar Hero enthusiasts, Canadians, and guys like Ron Paul’s son Rand (I doubt he was named after the atlas company). 2012, however, has to resort to cheap tricks to lure us into theatres like miscasting John Cusack and then drenching him with pails of water as he stands in front of a blue screen for hours on end.

But a true Howard Roarke cannot submit to the will of the masses and allow a film like 2012 to exist at the expense of 2112.  My suggestion is to exercise your free will by storming your multiplex's projection booth, mute the soundtrack of 2012, crank 2112 through the Dolby THX sound system, smoke lots of weed and rock out to the creative destruction. It's either that or wait for 2112: The Musical.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Ed from Rushisaband.com informs me that Peart has distanced himself from objectivism in recent years.  In Peart's books he has desribed himself as "no one's disciple" and a "left-leaning
libertarian".  --Bob Calhoun, Nov. 13, 2009

With acknowledgment to the genius of Darren Norris for coming up with the concept of this post.

When he's not being hit by steel chairs or fighting Sasquatches, Bob Calhoun is a San Francisco author and journalist. His bestselling punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, is available through Amazon.com. The book is also available for download for Macs, PCs and the Sony e-Reader.