Tool is playing with your mind; Teaching vs. doing (sort of)

When listeing to this album, I am always wondering what stance the musicians take behind the music. What were the intents and directions taken to produce a mysterious opus like this. Lateralus (TOOL, op. 4) is a concept album that stands on its own and goes a step further in the effort of the collective. Take a look:


Restructuring Lateralus: Tool's Holy Gift Fans of the alternative metal band Tool have to be some of the most curious and creative in rock. They are incredibly active interpreters of Tool's music and lyrics and are proud of their sense of intelligence as fans. Tool's aesthetic lends itself very well to wide ranging interpretation, dealing as it does with "alternative" views of inner consciousness, vaguely Buddhist spirituality, and other interesting philosophical inquiries such as the mutation of DNA and the concept of a Third Eye. In other words, these are not songs about your best girl and movies on a Saturday night. The band's music can best be described as drawing on the aggression and ensemble virtuosity of metal combined with the kind of tortured interiority that characterizes Radiohead's post-O.K. Computer music. Such a combination certainly sets them apart from many metal bands, and the centrality of their unusual lyrics only adds to the mystique of the band.However, any previous interpretative theories by fans have been outdone by the recent focus on the notion that the entirety of Tool's most recent album, Lateralus, actually needs to be reordered in order to reveal a secret message dealing with moving through consciousness as a movement of along spirals: "Spiral out, keep going, spiral out" sings Maynard James Keenan toward the end of "Lateralus," the album's title track. Added to this is the tantalizing prospect that the album and its message are also influenced by the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. When plotted on a graph Fibonacci numbers form a spiral-like image. Moreover, the main riff in "Lateralus" is comprised of three different meters: 9/8, 8/8, 7/8, or: 987, which happens to be the sixteenth step in the Fibonacci sequence (as observed by Keenan himself during the writing of the song). Moreover, moreover (!), Keenan's halting vocal rhythms during the first verse of "Lateralus" correspond to Fibonacci numbers in their syllable counts:

1 (Black)
1 (then)
2 (white are)
3 (all I see)
5 (in my infancy)
8 (red and yellow then came to be)
5 (reaching out to me)
3 (lets me see)

Restructuring Lateralus: Tool's Holy Gift

I plan on doing some more of my own writing and more pictures. Unfortunately, the Flickr photos I try to post don't always appear and instead create a blank link. I have been writing on some random topics lately along with some minor poetry. I'm trying to get more into the improvisational stage of creativity instead of just the reproductive. It plays such an important role in my educational philosophy, but yet I don't create in my own education as much as I should. In the back of my mind, I hope this leads to an inspiration in composing.

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