Tool - Opiate

It's been a long time since I could honestly say I've had a favorite band. The older I get the more I qualify all my opinions with some sort of academic nonsense. Blame my liberal arts education. I know I do every day.

Sure, there's bands I listen to significantly more than others, and based on play count my Last.fm profile will tell you who my favorite bands are, but even that list comes with a serious caveat: the majority of those plays came while I was still working as a cook. For the sake of not wanting to piss my coworkers off with some of my more whimsical tastes, I instead played a great deal of much "safer" music. So although those stats are interesting, they're really only part of the picture.

That said, Tool is an historical favorite band of mine. I remember drawing a big Tool logo on my dorm window in 2001 when Lateralus came out. I remember countless drunken singalongs. I remember being told during the height of my Tool mania that I sang a lot like Maynard. If people were being more honest, they would have said I sounded like a kid who hadn't found a voice of his own and wanted to sound like Maynard, but hey.

Opiate is a fun EP. It's got all the earmarks of what Tool would become, but it's rough, lacking all the polish (though not the musicianship) of their later records. I know in later years Maynard has come to be pretty detached from a lot of these early songs, having trouble identifying with some of the violent imagery. More recently, perhaps in his wine documentary, he said something along the lines that it's great to be angry and focus that anger on the things that bother you, but that if you're still doing it 20 years later you haven't grown.

That makes sense to me. I certainly still love listening to my angry music, but I also find it pretty hard to write angry these days. Anger is a valuable emotion, but it really should just be the first step in an emotional chain that leads to understanding.

Anyway, enough sermons. I will leave you with this video from our 90s Off. The 90s Off is mythical beast that began one day when my good friend the Bearded Shithead sent me a video and demanded that I respond. We're nearly two years into it, and our output has slowed considerably, but it's always good for a laugh and a chance to reminisce about both awful and wonderful songs from our teens.

This one is well over a year old, but it's got me in drag singing "Opiate," so it's pretty hard to hate. Just take it with a grain of salt and know that we're not serious about any of this.