Are RUSH actually Prog?

LOTS of synth on the '80s albums — LOTS.

Mellotron (M400, owned by Hugh Syme, played by Geddy) on "Tears" from 2112 and four songs on Snakes & Arrows.

Violin (played by Ben Mink) on "Losing It" from Signals.

Acoustic piano (played by Hugh Syme) on "Different Strings" from Permanent Waves.

And you know what? A violin, oboe, cello or flute automatically make something "prog" about as much as a food mixer does. Just ask Rick Wakeman.

Growing up in Los Angeles area in the early 70s the FM station KMET 94.7 would play a lot of obscure hard rock and progressive rock and the DJs would use the term "progressive music" or "progressive rock". That is the station where I first heard Genesis, it was the Cinema Show from Seconds Out. Only played at night since it was a 11 minute song.

I only heard/read the term "prog" maybe in the last 25yrs.

At time like these I normally refer to my trusty 1978 NME Encyclopedia of Rock, in which ELP and Yes are labelled "techno-rock" but there is no mention of "progressive rock" in the entries for them or KC or Genesis.

In the entry for Tull it says they gained a devoted following on the "progressive rock" circuit alongside others such as Ten Years After, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and The Nice, so the term existed in 1978 but not as we know it today.

Since you admit you don't know the whole Rush output you are not qualified to pass on the correct information to future listeners. And BTW, there is a violin on the 1982 Rush album Signals.

Nope.....you can't simply go by a rock magazine or a music critic who both usually have an agenda. 

Rush has been described as being hard rock, heavy metal, acid, progressive and prog rock......bands like them are able to cover many rock based genres.

So how do you explain that EMI categorized DSOtM as Popular: Pop Groups?

I never said that genres didn't exist prior to the 70s. Of course they did. I don't know how old you are, but I would suggest that the importance and marketing of compartmentalized genres and the hyper-compartmentalization of music occurred in the late 70s/early 80s due to consolidation of corporate record companies and the emasculation of FM radio to fit very rigid marketing demographics based on ad buys. If you listened to a FM rock station in the early 70s, you heard literally everything. It was radio without borders, so to speak, and often quite radical in airplay (you could hear the MC5, War, P-Funk, Gentle Giant, early Genesis, Iggy, Neil Young, Mott the Hoople, Stevie Wonder, T.Rex, Alice Cooper and Bowie all on one station, interspersed with the Led Zeppelins, Doors, Hendrixes, Stones and Beatles of the world).  Hell, even AM radio would play at least the hits of bands like Deep Purple, Yes, Tull, The Allman Brothers and Uriah Heep.

That really changed later, and drastically. AOR rock made way for corporatization. It came to a point that you could hear a deejay announce they were going to play a certain band next, and with the utmost certainty you could predict that it would be one of two or three songs played in endless rotation. Ah, the endless drone of Boston, Foreigner, Styx, Kansas, REO, Bad Company, Bob Seger and John Cougar Mellonhead in a monotonous loop! We had a radio station in Detroit that started in 1980 with the call letters WLLZ -- and the running joke was that it stood for Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin, and then other stations adopted "classic rock" or "new wave", etc. Every station became a  stratified, stultified niche and MTV became its own niche. And creativity died.