Music Video Review: Sober
Few people would argue that TOOL’s music videos are so incomprehensible that most people watching them just give up altogether halfway through and start screaming violently at their girlfriends. If you’re already a fan though, you know you’re always about to see some fucked up shit, because basically that’s all TOOL is capable of producing. You could put TOOL in front of a table with a stuffed kitten, bright crayons, and pink cotton balls and in less than ten minutes, they would have probably constructed some strange puppet from hell that had working intestines and was able to digest its own face.
I’ve been a fan of TOOL ever since they were on the brink of obscurity, and since then I have watched them soar upwards until they got to where they are now, which is basically still on the brink of obscurity, but with a web site. TOOL has gotten their hardcore reputation by being the only band on Earth that can make millions of dollars off songs that for all intents and purposes, make absolutely no sense. TOOL’s incredibly hard rhythms and confusing lyrics brought on a following of millions of confused teenagers who couldn’t decide if the band was cool or not, so they followed anyway, just in case TOOL finally made a song that someone from this side of the universe could comprehend. With their new found following, TOOL followed up their hit songs the way everyone else does: by making a music video. This, in turn, turned out to be a bad idea, because as confusing as TOOL’s songs may be, their videos are a lesson in freakish strangeness, with a little grotesquely disturbing imagery thrown in for good measure.
I recently got my hands on that little box set of TOOL’s that contains a small DVD that has all of TOOL’s videos on hand for instant viewing. Funny thing is that when I first watched these videos on MTV a few years ago, I was nearly floored by the artistic direction they each contained. Now, however, when I’m able to sit down and watch them under my own scrutiny over and over again, I have come to the conclusion that, while these videos still do have incredible art direction, they seem to have been directed by someone who watched a few too many of those old stop motion animation Christmas films and went mad in the process. If you have seen them then you know what I mean. They are unlike anything from this planet, and appear to resemble more of what me and you used to do with our G.I. Joes when we were feeling particularly evil. Like the time you had to go to the emergency room at the animal hospital after you gave your dog an impromptu enema with Cobra Commander. Even with all the crazy imagery, we are still left with a few animated scenes, edited in with a few more animated scenes in a manner that make no sense at all.
Artful music video, or me this morning after eating a box of Pop Tarts? Too close to call.
This is where we come in. Since no one has been able to understand what the fuck is happening in any of TOOL’s videos, I will try to do the impossible by interpreting these strange puzzle-like four minute movies. I know many of you are thinking that I have been smoking way too much ground-up Tylenol to even consider doing something so ludicrous. Believe me folks, I have, and as far as I know you can’t even smoke ground-up Tylenol, which leads me to wonder exactly what the hell I am smoking right now. So let us start our little foray into the dark, disturbing, and oh-so-confusing world of TOOL…
Begin confusion….now:
The video starts off normal enough. We see a small disturbing claymation man walking through a crumbling and decrepit house that appears to have been less constructed than squatted. Actually, the house that our man is in has a freakish resemblance to my High School. Right down to the incessant delapitatedness and the countless urine stains on the walls. Our little man continues his journey through the house of shit until he is able to find a small box that contains… something. We don’t know what the box contains for now, but I’m guessing we will be seeing it again in the future. Do I detect a not-so-subtle foreshadowing of this article? Possibly!
The video continues following the strange misadventures of our little friend. Like the time he’s sitting at the table and he simply floats away.
Looking the whole time more like the kind of glitch in a video game where your character gets stuck and just floats off the screen, causing the game to crash, and the nearest Playstation 2 in the vicinity stops reading cd’s for no apparent reason. Also, our claymation man does many more exciting things such as:
- Walk around
- Make his arm move really fast
- Walk around some more
- Look at walls
- Float away from his table several more times
- Walk around
As you can see, it’s a veritable feast for the mind. This continues to happen for ¾ of the video until the director finally figures he simply cannot edit the same scenes together anymore and decides it would be best to make some new footage. This was, as it seems, when the director ran out of ideas and just said fuck it for the rest of the time remaining until he could collect his paycheck. Probably spending it on a prostitute so he could make her sit on a chair in the corner of his bedroom while he screamed incoherently at her breast. So now the director is forced to come up with something new, even if it makes no sense at all. This is where the video really starts to kick into gear. In a span of just a minute and a half a whole bunch of crazy shit happens which we will detail below.
Man Looks at Hall, Hall Gets Funky
This happens as our little man wanders onto the screen, apparently about to do much more mindless walking. That is until he finds a long hallway and looks down it, only to see, to his horror, that it RIPPLES! Holy shit. Now, if you are like me, then you are probably contemplating the enormity of this whole scene. While for most of the video our little man has been walking through endless halls with no other result than watching his head move slightly to the right, we are now treated with a full-on hall-rippling effect that has left most of us with only half our brains, since the other half just blew straight out of our asses from the sheer shock of seeing something interesting happen. We can only hope this mental stimulation continues into the next scene.
Man Discovers Brains in Pipes
I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to go change my pipes underneath my sink, only to find pulsating brains running through them. This can definitely be annoying and it is all too obvious that our little friend agrees. I mean, you really can’t expect those to be raising your home’s resale value on the market at all. Once those particular customers see bloated brains in your pipage you can pretty much kiss that homeowners loan down your ass. This is further emphasized by the following conversation that could very well happen to you:
Customer: Wow! I absolutely love the house! The pool was a nice touch and the underground missile silo is a nice added bonus, as well! I simply cannot find any excuse not to give you 68,000,000,000 dollars in cash right at this moment! Just let me examine the water supply real quick and I’ll…
*Customer turns on faucet, massive amounts of bloated brain and mucus flow out*
Customer: What is this?
You: Oozing brain matter.
Customer: I see… I think I will be leaving now.
You: You do that..*gets gun*
As you can plainly see, I ran out of steam about halfway through the above conversation, but it still stands that if you had brains in your pipes things would not go well at all. As for our little man here, he is more than willing to touch and investigate the brains. Probably because this is the single most interesting thing he has ever seen, apart from looking at a table and periodically floating away.
Man Discovers Friend in Wall
As strange as it may seem, it appears there was someone hiding in our little man’s wall this whole god damn time. This would probably be a good thing if it weren’t for the fact that our little man’s friend appears to have been made out of Play Doh that has been dipped in acid and flung into industrial waste for about seven years. The result being this guy, which of course just like the rest of the video, has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It appears that our director has once again thought of something he made in his off-time of dancing through his house naked with a decomposing corpse and thought he should definitely put it in the video somewhere. Even though it would make no sense at all and be so out of place it would make the brains seem like Shakespeare, it didn’t matter. He had to get that abortion of a Play Doh figure in there SOMEWHERE. And so here he is in all his decomposing glory, mindlessly sitting behind a wall, hopefully where he will stay for the rest of eternity.
Strange Man With Big Ass Gun Terrorizes All
Keeping with the above paragraph, another strange creation comes out of nowhere to burn its image into our eternal souls for no reason at all. It seems the only reason this thing is in the video is to steal the entire show by being by far the coolest damn thing you’ll see in the 4 minute span of the video. Sporting a kick ass metal plate over his mouth and a huge gun-thing that he pushes around for some reason, our disfigured gun maniac is definitely cool. Also his eyeball seems to be located a foot from his skull and likes to twirl around a lot on its exposed stalk, which just gets more cool points awarded to him in my opinion. Now only if the entire video was based around this guy chasing our other guy through the house, trying to stab him with the many various sharp objects protruding from his gun of absolute death, it would have certainly been a hell of a lot cooler than seeing shit like this:
Man Falls Down, Man’s Head Melts Into Goo
Don’t ask, just watch and cry with me…
Jesus fucking Christ.
This all continues until our little man finally gets up the nerve to open his box and reveal just what the hell was in there in the first place:
- Nothing.
Yes. Absolutely nothing. This man just lead us through the strangest 4 minutes of our lives by not only making us watch him walk and float in his chair, but he made us wait to see that there was in fact not a damn thing in his mystery box. Heck, anything would have been better than nothing. It’s kind of the opposite of the ending in the movie Se7en. We were never able to see what was in the mystery box, but we knew what it was and even when it never showed the gruesome contents, we could live with that. Instead in this, we are treated to an empty box with not a god damn bloody head or any type of human remains in it. You would think after the build up through the entire video we would at least get some payoff, but no. Nothing more than an empty box and a nice fade out, leaving us sitting and wondering just what the hell we just got done watching. Damn artistic direction. Damn it to HELL. Here, watch the damn thing yourself.
And that pretty much sums this video up in a nutshell. Contrary to what you may be thinking, I genuinely do love this video and everything TOOL does. But it’s obvious that the majority of people out there simply don’t get it, and this article was to just let them revel in their own closed mindedness. It’s interesting to see who actually reads all the way through these and the hentai articles. I know I’ll instantly be emailed countless death threats about me publicly stating I hate TOOL, when I have done nothing of the sort, and instead have made nothing more than a parody of their own stupidity. Simply because they were too lazy to read through more than ¾ of the article and decided they had seen enough and immediately started to hunt down small animals to mutilate and send to me via next day air mail. I can live with that though, I can use all the mutilated animals I can get.
Well that’s the end of another wondrous video review. I highly suggest if you’ve never had the opportunity to see this and other TOOL videos in all their glory that you should do so immediately. They are more than worth your time and money and go a long way in showing just how shallow and moronic the mainstream music scene’s current videos are. If it wasn’t for bands like TOOL, I doubt I would even give a shit about modern music. Now let’s all go back to our daily routines of doing absolutely nothing and fantasizing about our girlfriends in a lesbian sex scene.
Until next time, tally ho.
