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Rush - The Enemy Within

Rush - The Enemy Within Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Grace Under Pressure
Released: 1984

The Enemy Within Lyrics

Things crawl in the darkness
That imagination spins
Needles at your nerve ends
Crawl like spiders on your skin
Pounding in your temples
And a surge of adrenaline
Every muscle tense to fence The Enemy Within

I'm not giving in to security under pressure
I'm not missing out on the promise of adventure
I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes
Experience to extremes

Suspicious-looking stranger
Flashes you a dangerous grin
Shadows across your window
Was it only trees in the wind?
Every breath a static charge
A tongue that tastes like tin
Steely-eyed outside to hide the enemy within
To you, is it movement or is it action?
Is it contact or just reaction?
And you, revolution or just resistance?
Is it living, or just existence?
Yeah, you, it takes a little more persistence
To get up and go the distance

I'm not giving in to security under pressure
I'm not missing out on the promise of adventure
I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes
Experience to extremes

Writer/s: NEIL PEART, GEDDY LEE WEINRIB, ALEX LIFESON
Publisher: OLE MEDIA MANAGEMENT
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

The Enemy Within

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): "It's part one of a trilogy but it's the last one to appear. The last three albums have each contained a part of that trilogy, and I started thinking about them all at the same time, but they appear in the order in which they were easiest to grasp. In other words, "Witch Hunt" was the first one, dealt with that mentality of mob rule, and what happens to a bunch of people when they come together and they're afraid, and they go out and do something really stupid and really horrible. That was easy to grasp, and you see plenty of examples of that in real life as well as in fiction and in films of course, too. So that was easy to deal with. The second one was "The Weapon," and it was dealing with how people use your fears against you, as a weapon, and that took a little longer to come to grips with, but eventually I got my thinking straightened out and the images that I wanted to use, and collected them all up, and it came out. And then finally, "The Enemy Within" was more difficult, because I wanted to look at how it affects me, but it was more than about me. I don't like to be introspective as a rule. I think I'm gonna set that down as my first rule, as "never be introspective!" But, uh, I wanted to, at the same time I wanted to write about myself in a universal kind of way, I want to find things in myself that I think apply." (thanks, Mike - Mountlake Terrace, Washington)

Rush - Red Sector A

Rush - Red Sector A Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Grace Under Pressure
Released: 1984

Red Sector A Lyrics

All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves is stay alive...

Ragged lines of ragged grey
Skeletons, they shuffle away
Shouting guards and smoking guns
Will cut down the unlucky ones

I clutch the wire fence until my fingers bleed
A wound that will not heal -- a heart that cannot feel --
Hoping that the horror will recede
Hoping that tomorrow, we'll all be freed

Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger -- too weak to cry

I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate
Are the liberators here -- do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother, it's too late
But I must help my mother stand up straight...

Are we the last ones left alive?
Are we the only human beings to survive?...

Writer/s: NEIL PEART, GEDDY LEE WEINRIB, ALEX LIFESON
Publisher: OLE MEDIA MANAGEMENT
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Red Sector A

The title is the name for the area where the band witnessed the inaugural Space Shuttle flight April 12th, 1981. The band wanted to capture the excitement of the launch with this song. Also see Songfacts for "Countdown."

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): "I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Dachau and all of that, and this person, she was a young girl, like thirteen years old when she was sent into it, and lived in it for a few years, and then, uh, through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that though all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds, they just never, ever wanted to be the ones who were shot, you know, they were always the unlucky ones, which was an important thing that I wanted to bring out. And also, what I learned from the first person nonfiction accounts that I read was that these people would keep their little rituals of their religion, and whatever, and if it was supposed to be a fasting day, even if they were starving to death, they would turn down their little bit of bread and their little bit of gruel, because this was a fasting day, and they had to hold on to something, some essence of normality, you know, that was important. And that moved me, you know. That's, that's intense. I wanted to give it more of a timeless atmosphere too, because it's happened, of course, in more than one time and by more than one race of people. It happened in this very country in which we sit, it happened, you know, the British did it, no one can set themselves above that, slavery rather involved how many countless countries in terms of the commerce of it all, and people shipping them around like animals and all of that. And no one can set themselves above that in a racial or nationalistic way. So I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving. You know, the people liberating them and themselves were the only surviving people in the world, and it sounds a bit melodramatic put into a song I realize, but the point is that it's true, so, you know, I didn't feel like I needed to avoid it as being over-dramatic, because, you know, I heard of it and read of it in more than one account."

Geddy Lee (Bass Player magazine, 1987): "When we play a song like 'Red Sector A' live, MIDI enables me to use the bass arpeggiator part, and send it to more than one instrument. Then I can get a really nice bass sound triggered by the arpeggiator that keeps the bottom end rolling and feeling good. That song sounds better live than it ever did on record, just because the technology has allowed me to get better sounds. That's another reason for doing this up-and-coming live album. I think some of the versions that we'll be putting on this live album are better than the original versions."

Neil Peart (Rush Backstage Club newsletter, July 1985): "It is one of the 'grace under pressure' themes which captured my imagination on the last album, and is not meant to portray a specific human atrocity, although many of the historical accounts which inspired it were of course set in World War II. There have been many periods of slavery and mass imprisonment in the world and also many fictional accounts of the future. I was thinking of all these things, and wanted to try to express something timeless enough to encompass them all." (thanks, Mike - Mountlake Terrace, Washington, for all above)

Geddy Lee's parents were Polish Jews who survived a number of concentration camps and were finally liberated from Auschwitz at the end of WWII. They lived in the camp afterward for four years before emigrating to Canada. For a while, the people left in the camp believed that the rest of the world had been destroyed and that they might be the only survivors. The song was not written specifically about their experience, but certainly includes it. In an interview, bassist Geddy Lee said, "My parents were in Poland at the outset of the war, and the Germans came in, and every man they thought could be a threat to them they took out and shot. As the war moved on they were taken to a concentration camp. As the war got a little heavier, they were all moved to different concentration camps. My parents were sent to Auschwitz where they survived, which they thought was a miracle. When they got liberated -- when the war was over -- they didn't know what to do. They still lived in the concentration camp, as most people did, trying to collect themselves. When they liberated them, they thought they were the only people left in the world Can you imagine that? They thought they were the few survivors. They were slowly informed that the world was still going on. Then they couldn't understand why they were saved. How could it happen? How could God let it happen? They gathered up what they could and came to Canada. They were going to go to New York, but someone said it was nice in Canada" - source: Circus Magazine, October 27 1977. (thanks, Patti - South Vienna, OH)

Rush - The Body Electric

Rush - The Body Electric Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Grace Under Pressure
Released: 1984

The Body Electric Lyrics

One humanoid escapee
One android on the run
Seeking freedom beneath the lonely desert sun

Trying to change its program
Trying to change the mode, crack the code
Images conflicting into data overload

One zero zero one zero zero one
SOS
One zero zero one zero zero one
In distress
One zero zero one zero zero

Memory banks unloading
Bytes break into bits
Unit One's in trouble and it's scared out of its wits

Guidance systems break down
A struggle to exist
To resist
A pulse of dying power in a clenching plastic fist

One zero zero one zero zero one
SOS
One zero zero one zero zero one
In distress
One zero zero one zero zero

It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays
To the mother of all machines

Writer/s: NEIL PEART, GEDDY LEE WEINRIB, ALEX LIFESON
Publisher: OLE MEDIA MANAGEMENT
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

The Body Electric

This is based on Twilight Zone episode #100 - "I Sing the Body Electric." The episode originally aired in 1962. It's about a family who orders a robot "Grandmother" after the death of their young mother. Written by Ray Bradbury, the name came from a Walt Whitman poem. The story was later included in a short stories collection with the same title in 1969.

Some believe the song was inspired by the movie THX 1138, one of the first films made by Star Wars creator George Lucas. (thanks, Mike - Mountlake Terrace, Washington, for above 2)

The song describes a robot who struggles to break free of the hegemony of the robots' social structure. The chorus repeats several times:
one-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one SOS
one-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one In Distress
1001001 is ASCII code for the letter 'I.' This could indicate the robot's motivation for escape - it's attainment of self-awareness. (thanks, Michael - Torrance, CA)