MTZ
N0t_5urePlease help me out here. I was never a huge Tool fan, but I did have Undertow, but I’m missing the joke here.
A lot of the lyrics to tool songs focus on transcendental, spiritual, or psychedelic experiences. They also feature complicated compositions and a high degree of technical skill. As a consequence, some folks that have a “I’m on a higher plane of existence compared to you sheeple” attitude are attracted to the band. Which I think is what the meme is poking fun of.
There is some truth to it I suppose. When pusicfer (whose lead is the singer from tool) released Apocalyptical during the pandemic (a song that was clearly criticizing the stupidity of covid deniers/misinformation consumers) a lot of tool fans got upset because the song was not consistent with their conspiratorial world-view
This is a good explanation. I love tool but I am not very smart nor don’t have a very good grasp in music theory. I just really really like the way their music sounds and it makes me feel a lot of things.
Some tool fans fancy themselves as deep intellectuals, simply because of their understanding of Tool’s lyrical themes, musical scales, etc. and assumption that other people just don’t “get it”. It’s technically very demanding and difficult music, and therefore attracts many holier than thou pretentious types.
Which is ironic because there are other prog bands out there that have far more complicated music. It just happens that Tool is one of the more accessible prog bands to casual listeners, the very ones who claim to like “complex” music.
ordnance_qf_17_pounderMars Volta is true intellectual
I’m sure there’s many other layers to this onion f we wanted to follow the rabbit hole…
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Eidola’s exceptional album degeneterra comes to mind. From memory they claimed the albums concept was like a tesseract that can be viewed from multiple angles through each song.
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There’s probably room for some bad religion in there, too?
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Katatonia probably deserves a mention as well, but it’s all so vague and personal it’s hard to really tie down.
I haven’t studied any of them, however…
Some Tool fans were pretentious. The music is complicated and hard to get into. Some songs are not in 4/4 time. The lyrics are hard to understand, dark and depressing. It was a good band for a kid who wanted to project the image of a brooding misanthrope. Most of the people this applied to are in their 40’s now probably.