The classic Tool song based on a comedy routine
When bands write music, they can focus on the most poignant or mundane life factors. This is the case with all forms of art. At the start of the process, as the artists sit in front of a blank page with nothing but the silhouette of an idea and all the time in the world, it’s up to them what the final product is. For Tool, this was always an exciting prospect, as their songs touch upon a range of topics, both deep and shallow, based on social commentary and complete fiction.
They were a band that looked forward to challenging themselves; no idea was too small, and inspiration could be found anywhere. For Maynard Keenan, he managed to find inspiration in one of the comedy routines of Bill Hicks, which spoke in-depth about Los Angeles and poked fun at the people who live there.
Comedy and music can often seem quite far apart, but their messages frequently overlap. The aim remains the same: to give the consumer something that they already know but presented in a way that resonates on a deeper level. The only difference is that music aims to stun and perplex, whereas comedians want to make consumers feel comfortable and laugh. Subsequently, while the product can look very different, the actual message embedded within it is often similar.
In Hick’s routine, he takes aim at Los Angeles, saying that the city represents America at its very worst. It’s a city engulfed by image and consumerism, which he always saw as a strange ethos to live by. He finishes his routine by saying that California should fall into the ocean and become Arizona Bay, a term which influenced a posthumous album containing Hicks’s best work.
Keenan was a huge fan of Hicks and allowed himself to be influenced by the comedian on multiple occasions. He did precisely that with the song ‘AEnema’, which is largely influenced by the Hicks routine that pokes fun at California and Los Angeles. While the City of Angels is a major focal point in the song, Keenan states it is less of a hit at LA and is instead a conceptual track asking, “What if everything was destroyed and we had to start over again?”
LA, in this instance, represents a backward attitude shared by many different people. Keenan refers to the Hicks routine and states that maybe sometimes things need to fall into the sea for us to evolve.
LA’s materialistic attitude and the people who live there have inspired a number of other artists to critique it in their work. The Eagles did this on their track ‘Life In The Fast Lane’, which mocked the material objects that residents of the city base their lives around.
Social commentary is a major part of a musician’s output, and given that a large portion of the music industry exists in LA, it’s no surprise that so many artists decide to write about it. They show the city in both a positive and negative light in doing so.
