Why do you suppose more males than females are Rush fans?

[Weatherman]

And almost all my favorite bands are British, but I've never set foot in England.

Hear, Hear. In my case it was because of the Beatles that I became an anglophile but most of the best groups at that time were English. Just as I love Canada and Canadians because I am a hockey fan..or is it the other way around? :coy:

The British tried to take over 90% of the world -- first economically, then politically, and finally musically.

Thank God they never learned to cook properly.

Why does anybody still like them? ;-)

[tangy]

Because Rush is such a long-lived band, the demographic of its audience has changed over the years, so my comments are going to focus mostly on the first decade of Rush as a recording unit -- this is when they developed their core fan base, a fan base that rewarded them for the risk they took in recording 2112, the success of which allowed Rush a shitload of artistic freedom.

 

My first Rush concert was 42 years ago today (Hemispheres tour) and I can confidently say the ratio of males to females in the audience that night was probably 20:1. That ratio was slow to change for many years, with the biggest single-tour shift happening during the MP tour.

 

The scarcity of female fans at those early Rush shows prompts two possibilities in my mind:

1. There were just as many female fans as Rush fans but the female fans didn't care to go Rush concerts

2. There just weren't as many female Rush fans as male mans.

 

I think it's the latter. I had many conversations with my male classmates in high school about music in general and Rush in particular, and far fewer likewise conversations with my female classmates -- they just didn't seem that interested. The reason for that is that my male classmates loved to talk about music, almost obsessively, and those of us who were Rush fans really connected. I don't know if it's true today, but back in the late 70s and early 80s, males tended to bond over musical interests. I don't know women did that much, but if rock music wasn't the lingua franca with females the way it was with males, then that probably explains why Rush didn't really catch on with females in the numbers that they did with males.

 

If there are any aged 50+ females in our ranks here at TRF, can you speak to this? Was rock music in general, and Rush in particular, something you girls would spend hours talking about in HS?

My take on this, I think that the way we consumed music in the 70's has some bearing on this. Top 40 radio played the hits of the Beatles, then bubble gum, The Jackson 5 and segued into disco. I don't remember hearing Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Rush on the radio because I didn't listen to hard rock stations in the 70's. Yet I went to a lot of concerts in the late 60's and early 70's and I saw Santana, Creedence Clearwater, Iron Butterfly, Amboy Dukes, eventually Kiss and Led Zeppelin. I heard about most of these groups by going to friends of friends houses and listened to albums they liked. I didn't hear Rush until my younger sister became a fan but for whatever reason they didn't call to me. My sister told a story of an encounter with a guy in one of her classes at the start of the school year. He sat down and asked her name then told her he was Alex Lifeson. She said no you are not, he laughed and said you don't even know who Alex is and she proceeded to tell him all she knew about Rush and he was taken aback. She was the only girl that called him on this gambit (or so he said) and they became fast friends after that. But why did she become a Rush fan and I didn't then, can't say. For me it is this assumption that girls weren't interested or the songs were too loud or complicated. It may have been true for some but not all.

I liked the sexy looking guys but I also listened to the music and picked out parts of bass lines and other things that caught my attention, so it just depended on what I wanted to listen to at the time and it constantly changed. My sister went to as many Rush concerts as she could through high school and beyond, I didn't see them until R30, go figure.

 

I went on to meet a musician and learned a lot about jazz fusion and some classic jazz and branched out into Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra but I loved ELO at the same time. I didn't come to Rush until late in their career and it was the same thing for me as with the fusion, I found things I loved about their playing and I liked that they weren't singing about party hardy all the time and getting girls to sleep with them. They made me think and I liked it, just like my sister was so blown away by 2112's story and how Neil weaved all these references into his songs. It's not helpful to try to pigeon hole female fans or generalize. Times change and musical tastes change.

 

I think the lack of female fans has just been a running joke, the scene where the band comes in the dressing room where Paul Rudd and his buddy were eating their food? Neil says I counted 7 girls in the balcony. Funny. I read some of the early comments when this thread was started and it is obvious they were trying to raise hackles and get some reactions. I'm just glad that my sister found them to enjoy and that I learned what I had been missing and became a big fan. There have been some good points made here but I guess I am too old now to get that upset about them, if guys want to use stereotypes to explain it, that's on them. I am a female Rush fan and glad I saw them 3 times in concert. It's all good.

Excellent post, Rhyta. Rush are top notch musicians and it`s obviously incorrect to suggest that cannot be appreciated by all people. A bit of a left-field comparison, but I remember reading how Morrissey is huge in Mexico and amongst the Latino community. Why? Who knows, but it makes no more sense then why I love Canadian and Californian music when I`m stuck here in the middle of the UK.

 

Supposedly he reminds of them of mexican ranchera music? I read this a while a back.

Perhaps this is what you read?

 

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/does-the-mexican-american-community-still-love-morrissey-despite-everything/

[IbanezJem]

And almost all my favorite bands are British, but I've never set foot in England.

Hear, Hear. In my case it was because of the Beatles that I became an anglophile but most of the best groups at that time were English. Just as I love Canada and Canadians because I am a hockey fan..or is it the other way around? :coy:

The British tried to take over 90% of the world -- first economically, then politically, and finally musically.

Thank God they never learned to cook properly.

Why does anybody still like them? ;-)

Can`t do very much about where I was born... :moon: