The Prescience of Rush's "Test for Echo"

- 5 minutes read - 854 words

In September 1996, my suite-mate Justin came home crowing about the song “Driven” from Rush’s latest record. Justin and I had bonded early during our acquaintance, some six weeks prior, over our mutual fandom of Rush. He was telling me that the new song, “Driven,” was heavy, a return to the harder-edged sound of their first album, already ancient then at some 20 years of age. Shortly thereafter, the album with the “inukshuk,” an Inuit marker of “a human was here,” entered the suite. And while I liked “Driven,” it was “Test for Echo” that spoke to me then and still speaks to me now because it, like Max Headroom, gave voice to the dawning sense that all this stuff was happening way too fast and the chief casualty may be humanity’s humanity.

With thirty years of living in my head rent-free, I still think of it often.

Here we go — vertigo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

It’s simple, but it describes everything afoot then and it prefigured the daily now.

Let me present the lyrics first:

Rush, “Test for Echo” (1996):

Here we go — vertigo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

Here we go — in slo-mo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

Some kind of trouble on the sensory screen
Camera curves over caved-in cop cars
Bleacher-creatures, would-be desperados
Clutch at plausible deniability
Don’t touch that dial —
We’re in denial
Until the showcase trial on TV

Some kind of pictures on the sense o’clock news
Miles of yellow tape — silhouetted chalklines
Tough-talking hood boys in pro-team logo knockoffs
Conform to uniforms of some corporate entity
Don’t change that station
It’s Gangster Nation
Now crime’s in syndication on TV

What a show — vertigo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

Touch and go — in slo-mo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

Some kind of drama live on satellite
Hidden camera coverage from the crime scene to the courtroom
Nail-biting hoodboys in borrowed ties and jackets
Clutching at the straws of respectability
Can’t do the time?
Don’t do the crime
And wind up in the perp walk on TV

Like many of lyricist Neil Peart’s best songs, the song is deceptively simple, but the structure gives away a steady workman’s attention to craft.

We open with a gauzy, helium-laden, upper-atmosphere hypoxia sound against the thin, unaffected guitars of Alex Lifeson:

Here we go — vertigo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

Here we go — in slo-mo
Video vertigo
Test for echo

It’s a dialectic: a dissociation into vertigo

(What kind?)

Video vertigo:

(What’s that like?)

a slowed-down controlled, curated, assault on your senses, decency, and humanity in slo-mo designed to maximize our advertiser’s reach.

(Whose opposite is what?)

I think I heard it, in that time, as a reflection on the OJ Simpson chase and trial, resolved the previous October. But Rush had already diagnosed Fox News, the Clinton show-trials, and the vertigo of manufactured outrage decades before I’d find those words.

The verses, such as they are, describe various uses of the vertigo machine. The first verse is influenced by the Rodney King riots, a presentation of the decline of humanity to itself as must-see TV. The second verse is how we’re served gang violence as entertainment. It also features some trademark Peart which leverages puns and clichés to create jarring linguistic dissonances.

Let me annotate this paragraph to show the brilliance, lyrical and satirical, at play:

Some kind of pictures on the sense o’clock news [not “six o’clock news”]
Miles of yellow tape [not “red tape”] — silhouetted chalklines
Tough-talking hood boys in pro-team logo knockoffs [ahead of “The Wire,” Peart reminds us that these “gangsters” are largely poor children]
Conform to uniforms of some corporate entity [Classic Peart rhyme with conform/uniform; also a hint that some corporation, the news, is getting rich off this]
Don’t change that station [A mocking ad vamp]
It’s Gangster Nation […continued]
Now crime’s in syndication on TV [Classic Peart again. Taking “crime syndicate” and destructuring the terms to describe “in syndication” – when there are enough episodes to be a saleable unit on TV]

There’s one final verse talking about the media landscape, but against the verses, the routine question is “Test for echo.” On the album cover, the inukshuk is more than just a cairn of rocks; it’s anthropomorphic. It’s the equivalent of saying someone was here, but moreover, it says: “A human was here. Did anyone see this?” That right there is the fundamental impulse. It’s the first test — the identity axiom of logic. It’s daring in the face of a child, saying “mama, mama, mama” a million times until you get the test for echo recognized and they say “mama” back to you. On a Unix system, echo is the basic input/output (I/O) command. It’s the equivalent of the identity statement: echo a returns a right back out. It’s Aristotelian non-contradiction as the basic test of a working system. And again and again, vocalist Geddy Lee asks: Is there a human out there? Is there anything that feels like a human ought? Test for echo.

I only hear static these days.