Tool - Lateralus
My first round of books has a tracking number, so they really should be here next week! Yay, but back to Tool.
Christgau called Lateralus "meaning mongering," and the 78:51 run time was universally seen as egregiously pretentious. Yes, it's long, but it's worthy of the length.
Tool is about challenging your perceptions. It took so long to make this album because it took 4 years to settle the lawsuits with their label. Copyright technicalities, contract options, if we hand the next album to you will you actually manufacture and distribute it or throw it in the dumpster and tank our career? We want a label that will actually answer that question. In the end, Tool won.
But, now a new problem. It's the year 2,000 and file sharing is a thing now. We all remember Metallica doing really nasty things to their fans, but Tool felt quite conflicted as well. This is a trickle down problem. At the end of the ledger, the major label doesn't lose anything, period. Like every other corporation, the money goes straight to the top, and gets distributed down as negotiated, in a beautiful world with mendelbrot-winged butterflies. If nobody actually goes out and buys the album, bands won't make any of that money when the tornados subside. The execs will make their money, but the band will take the hit. You have to look at it on a case by case basis to figure out who's stealing from whom; that's expensive lawyer work right there. The numbers are gigantic, but so too is the corporate machine. Thousands of people have a small role in making it all happen, and there's a pecking order when the money dispenser opens. Ignore sleazy managers and accountants gambling it away on the side while leaving the band with the tax burden, it's entirely possible for a band to generate millions of dollars in profit (not total revenue, pure profit), but still owe the label more and more money for all eternity.
But how is that possible, Bottle? It makes absolutely no sense. I agree, it makes no sense to you, and that's because you have a one-directional view of reality. Take my statement to heart: the inverse of a binary opposition is equivalent. You think you work for a corporation and they pay you for that work. The Missy Elliot version (flip it and reverse it) is also true: the corporation works for you, and they will take every penny they can steal. When you sign here and initial here and here, the label has promised to make and distribute your album, and you have promised to pay for it, in the future with money you might not make. That's a tough one when you live in a van eating the cheapest peanut butter you can find and hoping you don't have a flat tire on the way to the next gig where you might get stiffed and/or robbed.
Anywho, Alex Gray and the death and transcendence thing LSD does for a lot of people. This album is about the schism between mind and body, and the search for a way to reunite them. The physical and psychological worlds bump up against each other, and each side misunderstands and misrepresents the other.
Damnit, need to buy more tools. The fibonacci sequence and the spirals it creates, abstract geometry, occult philosophy and Enochian, the 16th-century constructed language of John Dee and Edward Kelley, oh and Area 51.
It's easy to get overwhelmed and frustrated and give up, like Christgau and everyone else who just want perky 3-minute synopses of small portions of the modern human condition. But, as Maynard says, be patient. If there were no reward for following this tedious path of actually living life, i wouldn't bother doing it. No one ever said it had to be fun. Think about it, if you can watch all the pieces fall apart, then logically they do fit back together like a trillion-piece jigsaw puzzle. How about we start by learning to talk honestly to each other again, huh?
One of the things that really connect with me is the choice to live in the experience. We tend to think that the mind is a fluke accident, sentience just magically popped out of our atoms vibrating together, but aren't we all desperately trying to look at it the other way around? What if consciousness is the eternal force, and this life is simply one stage in that process? I prefer to think of it as an interesting snapshot of complex causality, existence being the infinitely evolving vibrations of a singular pulse, an unpredictable binary on/off. If you need God to be the lightswitch operator, go right ahead, but we can't see what the "off" side looks like, and we never will. We will only ever experience half of reality.
This album sounds like being close enough to that singularity to see the chaotic ripples in the fabric of existence. That's my jibber-jabber, and i'm sticking to it.
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