1.14

Tool Fans

Today's topic is fans of the band Tool because nothing new is going on in my personal life. I can say that Tool is deeply rooted in my development as a person, but not in the whole "holy shit, I took DMT when listening to Lateralus and shitting my pants activated my third eye" way.

When people find out that I don't talk to my dad, they tend to ask why. It's not something I like talking about, but luckily, "He's a corrections officer" suffices as long as the person I'm talking to has also encountered a corrections officer before. (Just about all of them are the same. It's a very interesting yet tragic phenomenon.) However, if they haven't, the next best thing I can say is, "He's also a lifelong Tool fan," which gets nearly the same reaction as the prior.

It's hard to explain a Tool fan to someone unfamiliar with them, but I think you can get the picture from my earliest memory of Tool:

There was a day in fifth grade where we learned about Pascal's Triangle, and this led our class on a tangent about the Fibonacci sequence. Our teacher blew our minds by explaining the golden ratio and the spiral and then showing us dozens of examples of that spiral appearing in nature. 

My dad picked me up from school that day, and as we were pulling into the driveway, he asked me what I learned in school. I told him about the Fibonacci sequence. 

The Fibonacci sequence to a Tool fan is like a full moon to a werewolf: once it appears, there's no stopping the beast it'll unleash into the world.

He immediately starts rambling to me about how there's this genius band called Tool that wrote a song all about it. He pulls a lyric video up on YouTube, throws it up on our TV, and starts yelling numbers over the lyrics of a song called Lateralus and talking about how smart the band is. There's been other moments over the years, like not letting me and my brother leave the car until that one Danny Carey drum cam video ended, but the Lateralus incident especially defined Tool for me as cringeworthy for a long time.

(Unfortunately, it's actually a very cool performance.)

What absolutely sucks about people overexplaining Tool like this is that using the Fibonacci sequence to write your lyrics is actually a really cool idea. If you listen to the verses and count out the syllables of each phrase, you'll notice they follow the Fibonacci sequence, going up to thirteen and then back down to one. It's a cool fact you can drop on a new fan, but there's no need to shove it in everyone's faces unasked for.

Tool fans think they're running circles around your intelligence for knowing this 'hidden' secret of a song (it's not like they hint it at all and have vocalist Maynard James Keenan yell "spiral out" during the outro or something). They think this sort of deep musical analysis and the overall complexity of Tool's songs puts the band as well as their fans above the rest of the world (DO NOT get them started on the time signatures of Schism either, which is really just 12/8 broken up in a funny way. Don't tell them that either). The humor of all this pseudo-intelligence comes to light once you actually read the lyrics of the chorus:

Overthinking, overanalyzing, separates the body from the mind

Withering my intuition, leaving opportunities behind

What these kinds of fans don't realize is that Tool is making fun of them. They think fans who use their music as a sort of intellectual high ground and waste all their energy overanalyzing it are kinda stupid and should be doing more valuable things with their time. Yet for whatever reason, this always seems to go over the target audience's heads because they're doing the exact thing the song is talking about, funny enough, to the same song.

these guys are clearly trying to be taken seriously

In high school, I realized (to my own dismay) that Tool's music was actually pretty awesome. I went to see them with my dad when I was 17, and I'll never forget how annoying the people around me were. I think a lot about the woman next to me tapping the center of her head (to open her third eye, a big thing among fans) while the band played Hooker with a Penis of all things (a favorite of mine), where they spend the whole song just calling their fans stupid. So many people in that arena in New York reminded me of their song about someone that takes so much DMT that he thinks aliens told him all the secrets of the universe, just for him to forget what they said and shit his pants (Rosetta Stoned). 

Why are so many of them like this? Maybe it's because they're a progressive metal band? But even then, no other prog metal bands I can think of have a fanbase this large with this bad of a reputation. There's obviously pretentious metalheads in any metal band fanbase, but why is this circus of a fanbase so relatively mainstream? I really don't know.

When you look at the guys in the band and the things they've said and done and written about over the years, it feels even more strange to look back at the fanbase they've created. I get that their music often sounds pretty serious, but when you actually look at what they're writing about, it paints an entirely different picture. Even the band's name is a dick joke (look up their original logo)!

You'd think that with the rise in people making fun of these fans, there'd be fewer of them, but there aren't. Even my old music history professor is one of those people (I think I hate that guy). They live among us in secret until you ask them about that little eye tattoo they have or dare to mention math within their proximity. It's kinda scary knowing they could be anyone... even you.

..Even ME. In 2020, when I was well on the way to becoming one of those fans. I was sixteen and just discovered Godspeed You! Black Emperor (no shade, good band), and I thought I was smarter than everyone. I grew up, but scars of the past remain. My family got two cats that Christmas. We've had Maynard for five years now. 

sometimes my mom baby talks him
and it takes me back to this album cover

and his sister Taylor (Corey Taylor of Slipknot)

 The good news is that fans my age are mostly way less insufferable than the older fans. I've actually performed some Tool songs with people before (We did Parabol/Parabola and The Pot)! People think the music's cool when you're not acting lame about it! Playing and listening to their music is a lot of fun when you don't have someone in your ear trying to tell you how smart they are for 'understanding' the deep meaning behind it. The real genius of Tool is their irony: something people like my dad and jerk professor just don't seem to understand.

My Music Collection

To stay on theme, we're picking Lateralus by Tool! This is definitely one of the coolest-looking releases I own. I wish the sound quality was a little better, but I listen to my CD more anyway. 

There's a lot I've said about this album already, but I can also add that this band is a powerhouse. There's a reason they've had the same four guys forever (they swapped to their current bassist in 1995). Every riff they put together is extremely tight, whether it's on one of their quieter songs or their loudest. The real star of the band in recent years has become Danny Carey because of his drum playing (they put him center stage with the biggest kit ever live), but every member is worth tuning in to when you listen. 

My favorite is definitely Parabola (it's technically two tracks, Parabol and Parabola). This is one of those songs I don't want to spoil at all because listening to it for the first time blind was such a fun experience for me. Like I said before, a few friends and I performed this song, and it was some of the most fun I've had on stage ever. I got a lot of compliments from my friends, professors, and even my boss (this was in the concert hall at my college where I work)!

 

Hope everyone's having a good weekend. See you tomorrow! -G