Because I grew up listening to classic jazz and sea shanties on a vinyl record player, only dimly aware of the existence of radio, I am egregiously behind the times when it comes to popular music. Take, for example, the progressive art-metal band Tool (often styled TOOL). They’ve been around since 1990, and I discovered them in June 2019. Typical.
Granted, part of that wasn’t my fault — they’re a legendarily enigmatic band, and their catalog was not on any streaming service or digital distributor until August 2019, so when I discovered them, the only way to own their music was via physical copies.
Despite my free admission that I’m a latecomer to Tool, they’ve rocketed to the top of my most-played bands in the months since I first engaged with their music. If my musical taste is a jigsaw puzzle, then Tool is the bizarrely-shaped, genre-bending, bass-heavy, virtuoso-musician, orchestral-metal puzzle piece I was missing.
…Tool, with their listeners in tow, prophetically disturbs the comforted and sings the dirge of our own self-madeness….
Every aspect of their musical style is something my prior experience has primed me to love, and yet the combination is something I’d never experienced before. Take as an example what may be Tool’s flagship song, “Lateralus”:
>The slow-burn emotion that I’ve loved ever since listening to John William’s “Anakin’s Dark Deeds” in the Revenge of the Sith soundtrack? check.
>Carefully orchestrated drumming, where every note is placed like the finishing touches of calligraphy, echoing the jazz greats like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa (not to mention the titans of rock like Neal Peart and John Bonham)? check.
>Bewilderingly complex time signatures that enrapture me like a DCI bassline? check. (Yes, I do believe the drumset is the true melody of rock. Sue me.)
>Vocals that have the mesmeric metaphysical chant of Ola Gjeilo’s “Ubi Caritas” meets Palestrina’s “Osculetur Me”, and occasionally slip into the ecstatic harmonies of ABBA and Iron Maiden? check.
>Meditative energy more concerned with evoking a mood than with meeting the 3:30 optimal length of SummerPopHitXYZ.mp3, a trait I first noticed in Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack? check. All of these taken together show the makings of a pretty-much-perfect song, and “Lateralus” is indeed a practically perfect song, the Mary Poppins of metal.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I like everything about Tool. In fact, some of their music is downright disturbing. The implied violence of “Stinkfist” or the crass shock-mongering of “Opiate” (then again, this applies to Opiate too) are hard to listen to. I even avoid listening to tamer songs like “The Pot” or “Rosetta Stoned”, because they’re so catchy that I’m guaranteed to be singing it all day… but I don’t really want to be humming profanity to myself in the office.
So, if Tool contains some of the best music I’ve ever heard, side-by-side with some of the ugliest sentiments ever expressed in music, what’s the resolution? At times like this, I’m reminded of the German Expressionists like Otto Dix, whose paintings were shocking, ugly representations of war-ravaged Germany. (See Self-Portrait as a Soldier, or The Skat Players.) Those works were indeed ugly, but to a purpose — Dix’s reckoning with trauma and his own psyche, and a much-needed public rejection of the paradigm of pre-modern warfare expressed by “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori“. The art of Dix and his contemporaries was meant to, in the words of Cesar Cruz, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted”. That is true artistry.
Tool’s music is a bit like those German Expressionists. The outrage and venom evident in their early efforts, whether they intended it or not, functions as a voice isolated by postmodernism and failed by trusted cultural institutions. So, the trip through Tool’s first 3 projects can be a bit of a downer. But the very fact of that prior sadness enables Tool (and their listeners) to grow past that point. As Walter Brueggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination, the task of a prophetic voice is to “bring to public expression the dread of endings, the collapse of our self-madeness … [it is to engage] the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. It is indeed their own funeral.” Tool is one such prophetic voice.
Tool, with their listeners in tow, prophetically disturbs the comforted and sings the dirge of our own self-madeness. It is impossible to listen to Tool’s early music and not come face-to-face with the ugliness of our own Selves — we mourn the loss of our innocence even as we identify with the violence of Tool’s music. Tool even explicitly urges their listeners to “just admit it / we won’t give pause until the blood is flowing” (from “Vicarious”). But Tool, once they have truly acknowledged this communal depravity, begins to transform and cultivate wisdom. As early as “Forty-Six and 2” or “Schism”, Tool begins to lyrically seek existential progress, but this growth would not be possible without the disturbance necessary to make the arduous journey of self-discovery worthwhile. Out of death comes new life.
In this prophetic context, songs like “Lateralus” take on new meaning. Only now can they “swing on the spiral / of our divinity / and still be a human”. This lyric would be meaningless, milquetoast sentimentality if not for the sincere reckoning with failure and violence that came before. (Once that reckoning does occur, though, the listener can identify with the “communal divinity” of “Lateralus”, even if we don’t intellectually agree with the implied pantheism.)
And “swing on the spiral”, Tool indeed does: after the self-discovery of Lateralus, the band re-evaluates religion and society from a more mature lens in 10,000 Days and reaches new pinnacles of — dare I say it? — wisdom and serenity in Fear Inoculum.
After 30 years of prophetic growth, Tool reflects on their past in Fear Inoculum‘s eponymous single: “Immunity, / Long overdue. / Contagion, / I expel you. / Naive, / I opened up to you: / Delusion from mania. / Now, contagion, / I exhale you… Bless this immunity.” And the listeners, too, can expunge the contagion of fear and violence, now that they have journeyed alongside Tool.
It is this prophetic journey, from sorrow to self-discovery, from violence to peace, from outrage to understanding, that makes Tool the most compelling metal band of our time.
That, and they’re still. so. catchy.
(Fear Inoculum: 10/10. Hook up your audio IV and don’t open your eyes for 87 minutes.)