Learn to Swim

Relistening to Tool's "Ænema" after Tropical Storm Ida

You may have heard that it rained recently in New York. You may have seen videos of subway stations filling up with water or of a man smoking hookah in a pool float on a flooded street. Maybe you read about the tragic deaths of people in basement apartments in Queens. Maybe you didn’t see any of this because you live in Louisiana and had to deal with an even worse version of the same storm (hope you’re doing ok, JQ!).

This isn’t the first time in my lifetime that NYC has been slapped by tropical storms, but it was the first time that I woke up to a fleet of texts and DMs asking me if I was ok. I am, physically at least. Mentally, well…

First and foremost I have been frustrated with the dueling bozos of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio who had years to prepare the city and state’s infrastructure for our changed climate and instead spent much of the decade in a petty dick measuring contest. But underneath this political frustration I felt a burbling anger at something far more trivial that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. After a few failed attempts to name the source of my aggravation, a few swings and misses at straw-men on social media, I was prepared to charge it to the game and resume being pissed at elected officials. Then an image bubbled up from my subconscious. A bald man, shirtless, body painted blue, breathing the word “hey” into a microphone over a churning D minor guitar riff. Suddenly everything snapped into place. I was mad at Tool.

Tool, if you are unfamiliar, are an alternative metal band from the 90s. Their reputation varies drastically depending on how you feel about their music. Tool are famous for creepy, practical effect heavy music videos, taking a very long time to release new music (they’ve put out a total of five albums in 28 years), making music that is rhythmically complicated, and being one of the few heavy-ish bands that can reliably pack arenas around the country. Fans of the band consider them to be rock music par excellence, a quartet of musicians capable of writing songs too complex for the average person to comprehend, whose work is guided by arcane mathematical principles and heady psychedelic spirituality. To anyone outside of the initiated, Tool are the epitome of Fake Deep, a butt rock band that happened to take acid once and are now stuck playing in a single key, who have duped legions of meatheads into thinking they’ve unlocked the geometric truth of the universe through dumbed down King Crimson riffs.

I have lived on both sides of this divide. 

If you conducted a survey among my high school classmates about my three most prominent personality traits you’d probably get these results: 1) Atheist 2) Asshole 3) Tool fan. “Wow,” you’re probably saying to yourself “sounds like you were no fun to be around.” Fair, but take my word for it that I was even less fun to be back then. According to popular consensus this made me a fairly typical Tool fan: smug, self-righteous, cursed with an over inflated sense of their own intelligence, and hampered by unresolved resentments. That shoe fit until I wore its soles out. No song better sums up the unlikeable Tool fan persona than the title track of their second full length Ænima, which happens to be the exact song that irked me in the wake of Ida.

(Before I get into why this song pisses me off so much, I need to clarify that I am aware of the anonymous accusations about Tool lead singer Maynard James Keenan’s sexual misconduct. That story broke while I was head editor at Invisible Oranges and our editorial staff all agreed that an anonymous twitter thread wasn’t sufficient for us to report on it, but I have some anecdotal evidence in my personal life that leads me to not dismiss these accusations out of hand. In the case of this particular newsletter, I will be separating the art from the artist. Tool fans should take no solace in this fact. I will not hold back.)

The “Good Part”

“Ænema” is a mean-spirited revenge fantasy about the city of Los Angeles collapsing into the Pacific Ocean. It is, by modern Tool standards, a short song. This means that instead of being 12 minutes long it is only six and a half minutes long. It follows a pretty straightforward verse-chorus form for its first half then veers into a bridge that lasts until the end of the song. This linear second half is the good part that the Tool fan in your life may have implored you to wait for when they showed you this tune.

Because I’m going to spend most of this letter explaining why this hypothetical tool and the actual Tool are wrong, here I must admit that they are right. This song’s second half is, on a purely musical level, pretty sick. Powered by Danny Carey’s tom-heavy drumming, the rhythm section turns what could have been a bog-standard hard rock tune into a churning maelstrom. In its final moments this rumbling chaos reduces to its most essential elements. The band split in half to perform two parts of a polyrhythm, Keenan and guitarist Adam Jones play groups of four while Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor play groups of three. 

This is the “good part” not only because its the most pleasing part of the song to listen to (although I mean, wow, Carey’s kit-spanning drumming in the build up is practically a massage for your ears). It’s the good part because it’s the part that makes the rest of the song make sense. Tool, the scamps that they are, put “Ænema”’s rhythmic decoder ring at the very end of the song. Once you’ve heard this 3 against 4 clave, everything before it locks into place. 

With this handy guide it’s easier to hear that the whole song is based on the tension between groups of three and groups of four. For the song’s first half these building blocks add up to a fast paced 12/8 rhythm. Nothing too fancy on it’s own, but it serves as a launch pad for the band’s more interesting ideas. In the spaces between verses and in the moments leading up to the song’s chorus, at least one instrument will abandon the central pulse to wander over to a counter rhythm. Which member of Tool is holding down which part of the fort changes frequently, allowing them to stretch a pretty straightforward rhythmic concept into six minutes of music.

In the song’s second half this 12/8 rhythm is stretched into a slower and more ominous pulse of six. The aquatic doom that the song’s first half alludes to comes into sharp focus here. The band build and build and build in this section, grinding their way towards what feels like an obvious and cathartic pay off. Then just as that payoff seems to be just around the corner, Tool abruptly shift gears into a light and playfully soft anti-climax. Without fail every time I have shown someone this song, whether they were enjoying it up to this point or not, I watched their faces fall in disappointment. Many a “oh come on, man” has been uttered in response to this fake out. From a quick survey of reaction videos to this tune, this reaction is not isolated to my peer group. A few measures later Tool relent and give you the climax that the lengthy wind-up promised but the bad taste of the anti-climax lingers for the rest of the song. 

This part really pisses people off, and I love that! It’s a musical joke that works so reliably that I can’t help but marvel at its craftsmanship. The disappointment retroactively proves that the build up was a success. On first listen it almost feels like Tool are paying attention to how you are listening and changing their song in response to your feelings. That is a difficult trick to pull off on a recorded medium.

But once you’ve grown used to this song’s weird peaks and valleys, once you are firmly in on the joke instead of getting played by it, a different kind of bad taste reveals itself. No matter how well executed this fake out is, it has a pernicious effect on the song’s tone. By cracking a joke so openly and brazenly, this anti-climax lets Keenan’s lyrics off the hook. It is an overdue plea of “it’s just a prank, bro” after the harm is already done. And speaking of things that are overdue, let’s take a look at those lyrics.

But first, an intermission:

Ham Sandwich Voice vs Bologna Sandwich Voice

There’s an expression some of my musician friends use to describe a certain kind of male rock singer. You hear it all the time on rock radio or in the trailer for a new TNT Drama. A man who sounds like his mouth can open fully or not at all, bellowing near the top of his register. He’s here to sell you this truck, or to explain what he really meant to say. He roars wordlessly over a vaguely roots rock backing track while you wait for the Bulls game to come back on. His arms are wide open, and he’s got a ham sandwich voice.

Maynard James Keenan does not have a ham sandwich voice. Maynard James Keenan has a bologna sandwich voice. It’s still lunchmeat but you know, damper somehow? I’m not trying to imply that he’s a slimy person but, I mean, yeah sure. What I’m saying is that his singing is rock singing but slippery. The guy apparently really likes Joni Mitchell, and I get it, the way he glides over the rhythms of the band seems like the kind of thing a guy that really liked Court & Spark would do. Some of Tool’s best moments are a result of this textural contrast between the band’s rhythm section and Keenan’s singing. My issue is with what Keenan uses that voice to do on “Ænema.”

Don’t Let Others Suffer For Your Personal Annoyance

In the time honored tradition of beginning your public meltdown by attributing a statement to a poorly defined Other, Keenan begins the “Ænema” with the line “Some say the end is near”. Instead of fearing the end of the world, Keenan anticipates it with glee. Why is he so eager to watch LA and its population of 9 million people (as of 1996) sink into the sea? Because it is filled with “freaks”, latte drinking, prozac prescribed, hairpiece wearing, lawsuit filing, car driving freaks. Well, plenty of people drive cars and drink foamy caffeine beverages outside of Los Angeles county, so Keenan must be starting the song zoomed out so that he can zoom in for dramatic effect. 

Further along his targets get slightly more specific. After promising that mother nature’s wrath is the only thing that can solve this cultural rot, Keenan urges the following list of people to “learn to swim” with the same condescending tone that Twitter trolls use to tell fired journalists to learn to code: Scientologists, “gangster wannabes”, people with tattoos, “junkies”, and “dysfunctional, insecure actresses”.

Ah, I see. For a guy who hates cars so much, it sure sounds like Keenan is wearing Oakleys and yelling into his phone while sitting in the driver seat of one.

Where to even start with this mess? I could point out that Keenan himself is a tattoo’d rock musician who sings about anal fisting while dressed in women’s clothing, almost certainly qualifying himself as the kind of “freak” (his words, to be clear, all that sort of stuff is a-okay with me) he’s singing about. I could call Keenan a hypocrite for saying “fuck all you junkies” not five minutes before using a Bill Hicks sample to extol the wondrous effects of drugs on the creative process on the song “Third Eye.” I choose instead to let the guy at least finish his thought. Here’s what he comes up with:

“Don’t just call me a pessimist/try and read between the lines”

If you insist.

Earlier on I said something about “Ænema” being a good window into the conception of the average Tool fan. This is because the song’s lyrics show a crucial Venn diagram that also helps to explain the band’s enduring popularity. “Ænema” stands in the overlap between two otherwise distinct groups; people who find the very existence of “coastal elites” excruciatingly annoying, and people who believe that climate change is nature’s way of administering justice on a deserving mankind. At first glance these appear to be on opposite sides of the right/left cultural axis in America. You rope together a coalition like that and rock radio will have no choice but to grapple with whatever lumbering 10 minute workout you throw their way once a decade. 

(The third pillar of Tool’s lyrical identity is the “fresh off of some shrooms” sincerity that Keenan started leaning into on 2001’s Lateralus. You could infer from these three overlapping circles/pillars that the generic Tool Guy is pretty much identical to the generic Joe Rogan Guy. I won’t get into this comparison any further because I don’t have anything interesting to say about it.)

What holds this “Money For Nothing” faux-Joe Sixpack resentment together with hippified Old Testament eco-pessimism? Bluntly; flippant and small minded misanthropy. This is a common trait in my experience. You see it in the “serves you right” articles about COVID deniers dying of COVID, in the slogans printed in distressed fonts on the backs of gas station shirts that threaten violence over minor slights, and it bubbles under the declaration that nature is healing from a human virus. Every faction of modern society has its own sub-faction that shares “Ænema”’s distaste for humanity and its itchy trigger finger. And each of these sub-factions only maintain this attitude by avoiding the fact that on the other end of every violent fantasy of comeuppance there is a full human life.

“Ænema” takes this smug superiority, hands it the hadron collider and then points at a fly on the wall. The scale of the destruction the song invokes is completely out of wack with the pettiness of its target. Normally I’d qualify this question by saying something like “I don’t mean to read too deeply into this...” but again, the song explicitly asks that I read into it so: is the death of actresses on prozac worth 9 million or so bodies as collateral?

In reality of course, as we have seen and will see more of, disaster does not arrive evenly distributed. Speaking from my perspective on the other coast, before the water reached the “smiling glad hands” of the city it would crash through the houses downhill and through the doors of basement apartments. Knowing this it is impossible for me to take Keenan seriously. Therefore I have to conclude that “try and read between the lines” boils down to little more than “lol jk”.

This only leads to further frustrations. Now I have to come to grips with Keenan wasting an instrumental track as lean and dramatically structured as “Ænema” on sub-standard open mic night griping that doesn’t even have the guts to have a punchline. It’s vague allusions to metaphor are just a smoke screen for hack material and lazy bullying. This makes me feel like I’m wearing a blazer and screaming across a comically large desk at Stephen A. Smith. “Can the Tool locker room recover from Keenan blowing this song after they had it in the bag? Can he be trusted in high pressure situations? Does Maynard James Keenan want it enough?!?”

I know that there’s a chance you’re thinking “wait a minute, isn’t this guy being just as hyperbolic by invoking a local disaster in order to skewer a rock song he finds distasteful?” and you know what, you’re probably right. The old 2010s move here would be to inflate the target of my critical ire to the proportions of my political enemies. Maybe I could have worked up the nerve to call the song eco-fascist, but these days I’ll just settle for calling it dumb as rocks and a tough hang.

I know it is a tough hang because my brain retains the music it heard when I was a teenager better than nearly anything else I’ve thrown at it. Because of the way Danny Carey’s drums sound, I have had to entertain this slimy bologna flavored edgelord in the parlor of my mind for nearly two decades. If I’m returning the favor by being apocalyptically rude to the song, it’s only as a way of clearing it from my system. You want a righteous cleansing? Good riddance, down the drain you go. Learn to swim.