NetherV said:
I understand the confusion over their appeal; I don’t expect everybody to ‘get it’. Some people ‘get it’ while some don’t ‘get it’, others choose not to ‘get it’ and some people try too hard to ‘get it’. Personally I feel that you shouldn’t have to ‘get it’; I don’t get The Beatles, Elvis or Pink Floyd, I find The Godfather, QT films and Citizen Kane to be underwhelming garbage.
I don't think that you understand anything at all. There's absolutely nothing to 'get' in music - you either like the music, or you don't like the music. Some music has clever lyrics, some lyrics are more poetic than others and some lyrics are just chosen to fit the music. Some bands use deliberately unusual chord progressions or scales, and complex polyrhythms, whereas other bands are far more conventional. Some bands are influenced by a vast range of other music, and some bands keep their influences much closer to home Some bands deliberately structure their songs to tell a continuing story and create a concept album, and other albums are just a collection of great songs. In the end though, you still end up with 60 minutes of music which you can listen to all in one go or in four separate sittings, on your own in your room or out running, and in the foreground or the background. Some songs might reward repeated listens but in the end
it's still just music!
Some people need to be under a state of cultural-hypnosis in order to enjoy something; they wouldn’t enjoy Tool.
Come off it - how patronising do you really need to be? Some people don't like Tool because they just don't like that kind of music. The casual pop listener, the hardcore scene kid and the devoted jazz afficionado can all have one thing in common - they don't like Tool. Are you really going to say that they're all suffering from 'cultural hypnosis'? Haha.
A genre-less band that defies convention with their 6-14 minute tedious and bizarre compositions isn’t for everyone and I wouldn’t recommend Tool to anybody. Listening to a The band or computer generated beats is a much safer bet imo.
Tool are very far from the only band making long songs, or unusual songs. You can go back twenty or thirty years even, and listen to Pink Floyd, Genesis, Camel or ELP, who were all doing ten or fifteen minute songs regularly. Sonic Youth songs easily hit 7 or 8 minutes, and their sound was far more groundbreaking than Tool's. Today you can listen to GYBE, Explosions in the Sky, Silver Mt Zion or any one of a thousand other bands who are making 'anti pop' if you will - long, unstructured songs that don't conform to traditional songwriting rules.
You seem to be living in some bizarre fantasy world where you think that Tool are the only band making music more complex than three-chord pop, which is absolutely laughable. You can talk about the deep meaning of their lyrics or the complexity of their music or the hidden structure of their albums all you like, but I guarantee you that there are better poets, better songwriters and better musicians out there. In the end, Tool are still just another band - they just seem to attract overly obsessive, pretentious fans.
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