The first I ever heard of Tool was in 1996, when my best friend at the time made me a tape (a fucking cassette tape, yo! Goddamn I am old!). Side 1 was some album or another by some post-grunge group that was popular at the time. I don't even remember who the hell it was now, but it was the album I'd initially asked her for. Side 2 contained Tool's Ænima, for no other reason than that my friend didn't want to give me a tape with a whole empty side on it. She'd heard her brother listening to it and thought it sounded pretty cool, so on the tape it went. I think I listened to Side 1 once. I listened to Side 2 and everything in my life changed. I was an instantaneous Tool fan.

It was the song Forty Six & 2 that did it. I mean, the whole fucking album blew me away, but that song in particular was a goddamned baptism. I'd gravitated towards metal music at a young age, drawn by the nihilism and the great equalizer that is the looming specter of eventual death. How's that for profound? But no, really - I was a puny, sickly kid, picked on and ultra-sensitive, devastated to learn long before the age of ten that people weren't always who they presented themselves to be. I had no grasp of duplicity. I couldn't fathom manufactured enthusiasm. I detested being spoken down to. By the age of 9, I'd learned to loathe old ladies who bent down to tell me in syrupy tones how precious I was, how pretty and sweet. Get the fuck out my face with that shit, gramma. I'm not buying it. I had a vocabulary that got me in trouble - for instance, I once used the word mysterious in front of two friends in grammar school and was subsequently accused of being pretentious by same said two friends. Not that they used the word "pretentious." I think they said I was "trying to be all big" which, in grammar school-ese, translates to pretentious.

 

Wait, where the fuck was I going with this? Oh yeah... I was amazed that Keenan wrote with such unabashed intelligence. He wrote about fears and failures and feelings. He had an extensive vocabulary and wasn't afraid to utilize it. For so fucking long, I'd thought I was the only one who had fully articulated inner dialogue running constantly through her head. To utter it aloud was to proclaim yourself an uber-dorky pariah. But Maynard was doing it and he was cool! Maynard taught me not to give a shit what anyone else thought, and speak however the fuck I wanted to, hence the pretentiousness of this article.

There was no debating that the sounds produced by Tool were galvanizing. Powerful chords, bone-jarring bass, riffs as intricate as lace and as complicated as the Mandelbrot set. Keenan's vocals were (are) astonishing. Have you ever seen that cartoon depicting Visible Tom Waits? Hold on, here...

 

Yeah, there needs to be a Visible Maynard James Keenan.

Brain: Here Haunts the Anti-Zeitgeist, draped in the chains forged by organized religion and shame.

Tongue: Nahash, Ouroboros, the bringer of forbidden wisdom and the serpentine symbol of the eternal return.

Throat: Full Boar exhaust pipes, reverse angle cut, cast in pure chrome. 

Heart: A seven chambered abbey, descending through the  color spectrum and leading at last to the ebony clock standing alone in the obsidian chamber with the dreaded scarlet paned window, where Darkness and Decay and the Red Death holds illimitable dominion over all. 

Lungs: Nine Concentric Circles, from the blissful peace of Asphodel Meadows to the frozen torments of Cocytus. Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.

Listening to Tool is a lot like reading Dante'sInferno, or maybe having a really thorough colonoscopy: it forces you into places that you'd really rather not see - deep, dark, infected places filled with shit and pus and demons, places that sodomize you with acid memories and eviscerate you with regrets. Sure, it's easier to avoid those places; never look within, never learn from the past, never reflect on anything you've ever said or done. But if you finish the journey - force yourself through the misery and despair and ugliness - you'll find yourself free of Purgatorio and staring up at the starry sky in Paradiso. And if you're too fucking lazy to read the Divine Comedy, try this for a metaphor: an open wound will never heal if you ignore it. Rip that bitch sore wide open and look inside. Poke around in there. Find the source, drain the pus, cauterize it with salt and lighter fluid until you scream in agony. Healing is supposed to hurt like hell. You can only appreciate feeling well if you fully immerse yourself in the illness.

 

According to Green's Dictionary of Slang, tool has several meanings. In the current context it would probably mean "a stupid, useless or socially inept person". The first citation for this dates from 1656.