A new Tool for living in a post-kayfabe world
In a time of transparency and personal branding, what can we learn from artists who once depended on mysterious personas and the vaudvillian fakery of the pre-social-media era?
Consider professional wrestling. At its most popular, the entire enterprise revolved around “kayfabe.”
That was their word for the shared suspension of disbelief that kept the fourth wall firmly in place when wrestlers challenged their opponents during interviews or reached out to the crowd during strangleholds. It was all real, they assured the audience. Even off stage, no wrestler was supposed to break character, ever, and no fan was supposed to look behind the curtain — or even admit there was a curtain. To keep something as ridiculous as professional wrestling fun, everyone felt a responsibility to maintain its consensual, spandex-adorned false reality, which itself was just as fun, maybe more fun, than the suplexes and pile drivers.
Then came the @s and the hashtags and an era of staring into a livestream that stared back at you. For professional wrestlers, sending posts on a regular basis to show fans you were likeable and interesting and real became a necessity. They make fun of themselves now. They post pictures of their breakfasts, their new shoes, and the weird things they see on vacation. For them, for all of us, this became the new kayfabe, and the old kayfabe became something you only did in the ring or in front of a paying crowd.
For a while now we have performed life inside one kayfabe or another, enjoying intermissions that last as long as we can carry a conversation near a campfire or sing along to a song on a roadtrip. The rest of the time you need self-control or poor reception to stay your idle hands. Is it better or worse than before? I don’t know. Like all change, I suppose it’s just different, and it’s mostly those who had built a nest out of the thistle of the old ways who are starved for comfort. Yet, I can’t say I don’t miss the maintenance of mystery, the vaudevillian commitment to a promise that there were artists who did their work in esoteric realms. Sitting in a trailer in the woods of Mississippi, it heightened the escape, that fleeting feeling, like you had run away to join the circus when hiding from your family, but proudly exposing to your friends, the cover of an album or a book or a movie.
Evidence the old ways are gone: When Tool dropped their last album, 13 years ago, the same year Twitter was released and Facebook went public, if you wanted to learn more about the musicians you couldn’t depend on their website or newsletter. It was all misdirection into strange books, blog-post rabbit holes, and pre-social-media conspiracy theories.
The internet back then was an untamed, found footage kind of place where only the bravest of souls went to find the secret codes for Mortal Kombat fatalities. Get off the path and one fork could lead you to Terrence McKenna and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The other could take you to Charlie the Unicorn and Homestar Runner. Tool was somewhere in between, in that place where parody religions like Church of the Subgenius and ironic conspiracy theories like Ong’s Hat thrived.
Their very name was a joke, or was it? Sometimes they told you it meant their music was a tool for opening your third eye. Sometimes they said it was a throwaway phallic reference. And you could buy merchandise that confirmed either explanation. If you wanted to know anything, you had to go to independent websites, themselves a mishmash of unsourced rumors and creepy hyperlinks.
When we last heard something new, Tool’s aesthetic had evolved from angry-black-t-shirt-edgelord-skunkweed art to a psychedelic vision quest of science, splendor, and spirituality. The music too had grown from sounding like the soundtrack to a David Fincher film about doll people living in the tunnels under a meat-processing plant to a math-rock score for a Terrence Malick epic about the as-yet-fully-understood cosmic aspects of our shared humanity hiding in massive DNA strands circling Saturn. In all their incarnations, Tool was the prog metal version of counterculture kayfabe.
In an effort to avoid “selling out,” an idea that came and went with Music Television, the band curated a mysterious image that their fans helped them maintain. The music came in strange time signatures. The lyrics talked about sacred geometry and transhumanism. In the early days, thanks to this, a good portion of Tool’s fan base was made up of the people who read a few books and did a few drugs and noticed a few things before everyone else in high school and then made that their identities. To everyone’s benefit, the internet largely ruined that identity. Now anyone can look up the Fibonacci sequence and know as much as “that guy” did when he told you that according to the golden ratio Lateralus was meant to be listened to in a different track order.
Today, Adam Jones (guitar) shares his son’s breakfasts on Instagram and hams it up under reindeer filters on Christmas. Maynard James Keenan (vocals) starred in a documentary about his vineyard where he gave an interview sitting on the toilet and has been a regular on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he tells dad jokes and laughs at YouTube. Ernie Ball followed a staff-wielding Justin Chancellor (bass) around the rocky hills of Santa Monica to promote their strings. Danny Carey (drums) went viral when he dropped in on a teenage band and took over to help them play some Tool covers. Over that long stretch, they all created side gigs — bookstores and coffee shops and the like — and all the while they shared memes and promoted themselves like the rest of us, and even Alex Grey, the artist behind their flaming-chakra homages to DMT and Albert Hoffman, uses Twitter these days to sell discounted tickets to his gallery.
A few months back, peeling off the wrap from Fear Inoculum, I wondered what it would be like to listen to a new Tool album with all the kayfabe and pretension stripped away. I wondered, with their lives now out in the open, and with all of us feeling just as exposed, what would Tool look and feel like for an audience living through the greatest sociological shift since the invention of the printing press? Then I opened the wings of the CD case to reveal a video screen that awakened and began showing clips from the astral plane, and I smiled. The perfunctory CD sleeve was tucked in a corner, and pulling it free revealed a flaming third eye on a torch made out of DNA. I laughed. Of course it did. Yes, we are still Tool. Yes, you can still enjoy this. No, we are not channeling shamanic vibrations through our amps, but if we could, it would sound like this.
At Burning Man, on his dragon-shaped sand yacht, Alex Grey thanked Tool for its medicine, and called the album “affirmative to our spirit, to our creative spirit,” then he hit play, and the mostly shirt-and-pants-less crowd cheered as one man raised a penis-shaped wrench high above their heads. On Reddit, where I saw this, the post was flanked by memes of Ron Swanson listening to the album on his headphones, an avatar for everyone over 40 drifting away and rocking out at their desks.
The old kayfabe was ripped off all our backs in a single, unceremonious yank. And I assume a lot of art and effort and life has been standing frozen because of that, as if standing nude in one of those high-school dreams.
Fear Inoculum took so long to drop because it was written after an intermediate album that we will never hear. Eight years ago the band scrapped what they had written and started over. Under the pressure to produce a triumphant return in an age of transparency and immediate judgment, overthinking and second-guessing poisoned their process, so they’ve said in interviews.
Commenting on this, in an interview with Loudwire, Maynard said, “All of a sudden you wake up and it’s 13 years later. The hard part is accepting the fact that maybe you’re not as important as you think you are and you should probably just get on with it.”
