But didn't Circus magazine resolve that? Back in the early 80ies they did a spoof feature on Geddy Lee and Paul McCartney, declaring Macca the better bassist. Rush devotees (never the most humorous bunch) were enraged und wrote letters, but Circus did not budge, adding fuel to the fire "... besides Paul McCartney is richer!" , which provoked another letter onslaught. 
I always think that Geddy Lee is what a beginner bassist thinks a good bassist should be like. Busy playing with a noisy, intrusive tone and mining out every possible harmonic complexity within a fairly harmonically limited stretch of music. I was once that beginner bassist, thinking it was cool to copy the vocal melody for two bars a fifth above, and tacking horribly florid turnarounds on the end of every four bar phrase. Just because I
could see how it could work in the music I always had to do it.
I've never quite got my head around this dichotomy of Rush being this cult willfully obscure insider band that nobody has heard of, when you can buy their records in Walmart etc. Its stadium rock, a la Kiss, with some exotic percussion, opaque lyrics and the occasional unusual time signature or poly rhythmic kerfuffle. Some of their famous songs are a bit longer than Detroit Rock City, they wear kimonos and their singer sounds like an old woman.
As, as much as I love some of their stuff Rush is the worst of both worlds for me: The beard-stroking "you wouldn't understand it" snobbery of real prog rock combined with the sort of unreconstructed double-denim gropefest of Normal Rock.
