“That’s silly”: Maynard James Keenan remembers the moment Tool changed
Nostalgia has always been a powerful currency in culture, but more recently, it has been rammed down our throats incessantly.
As society sleepwalks into a near apocalyptic era, we’re forced to look back and yearn for a simpler time, watching some of our favourite movies of old or listening to records that soundtrack a more hopeful time.
It’s exactly why the appetite for Oasis hit fever pitch last summer, and hundreds of thousands of music fans dusted off their old bucket hats and desperately wished to feel the blissful ignorance of the 1990s, if only just for a night. The time that pre-dated social media and splintered social politics, where music was a simple vehicle of cultural escapism, played by inherently more impactful artists.
While the former aspect of that I can live with – I too dream of a time where the social constructs of life weren’t determined by social media trends. The latter, however, is a reductive argument trope that has been utilised by narrow-minded critics for years on end, predating any discussion around social media and the internet.
Yes, as long as music has been around, there have always been a generation of young fans having to battle against their forefathers telling them that the crap they are listening to today doesn’t have a scratch on the very best music of their day.
Kids had to convince their parents that The Beatles’ experimental music wasn’t just drug-fuelled nonsense, while Oasis fans similarly had to defend Liam Gallagher’s enunciated croon to purists. And today, in 2026, I have to push back against the bucket-hat brigade and tell them that their £500 might be better spent at an independent venue, where their fears of society’s cultural death could be squashed by the next great indie band,
Every now and then, we need a little help from the musicians of years gone by to engage with the modern-day world and divert the attention of their devoted fans onto modernity. While this side of the pond is covered by Elton John’s Rocket Hour, a dedicated space for new music recommendations, it seems as though Maynard James Keenan is willing to confine just one of his bands to the bins of history and move forward with the kids.
Speaking about his band Puscifer, Keenan remarked on the opportunity his career afforded him. With a fresher project to get his teeth stuck into, he could track the evolution of music fans and see just what ages were engaging with his newer music, as opposed to the work of his beloved band, Tool.
“All the kids from ages… 16 to 30, whatever, [were] huge Puscifer fans,” Keenan explained. “And they view Tool as like, when your uncle was into Steely Dan. You know, it’s this other thing that’s like, my weird uncle is into that.”
“I understand the procession because whatever you’re into as that adolescent kid, whatever your older siblings or uncle or grandfather was into, that’s silly. That’s grandpa music,” the singer remarked. “And we’ve been around long enough that we’re like, I’m spanning like three generations of people listening.”
Music is all about evolving with the times and appropriately mirroring the culture it exists in, and Keenan knew that well, which is why he continued to evolve his own career through the guise of different bands – of course, nostalgia is always fun to engage with, but it won’t sustain as a meaningful artistic practice.
