"Vicarious"

I remember the review.

5/5. Kerrang! Magazine. 

Until that point, the heaviest music I listened to was AC/DC.

I knew what metal was. Or, I thought I did.

I’d been given a record store voucher from my mother’s friend for my 13th birthday. I spent my lunch break tracking down that 5/5 album. 

On the bus back from school, I studied the album artwork. No lyric booklet. Instead two eyeholes with blurry plastic lenses. 

I pressed my eyes against the in-built goggles and flicked through the pages. Faces and heads blended together. 

As the bus lurched forward, I felt nauseous and quickly put down the CD case.

Then I slipped out the CD and hit “play” on my Discman. 

The heaviest music my 13-year-old self had ever heard began to play.

“Vicarious”.

While it’s true that Tool probably aren’t the best “intro” band for young metalheads, I don’t think I fully appreciated the album when I first heard it. 

“Vicarious”, the opening song on 10,000 Days (2006), is more than seven minutes long. On the same album, “10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)” runs for more than eleven minutes. And the runtime of the wonderfully-titled “Rosetta Stoned” is 11:11.

“Vicarious” was like nothing I’d heard before. The opening riff in 5/4 feels unsettling… like it never fully resolves. The riff mirrors the news cycle. Nothing ends. It just starts again and again. 

That riff is followed by a heavier riff, played on the low E string (tuned to D). As a “newbie” to prog metal, I wasn’t used to so many frequent time signature changes or to lyrics that seemed at once so personal, and so profound. The opening lyrics…

…seemed revelatory to a teenager growing up in the mid-noughties. The 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had produced wall-to-wall disaster footage watched compulsively by millions. The Iraq War was producing daily footage of urban combat broadcast into living rooms. And reality TV was at its cultural apex – American Idol, Survivor, Fear Factor… People would spend hours watching people in a confined space humiliate and inflict pain on themselves – all for the sake of “entertainment”. 

From this perspective, Tool’s “Vicarious” serves as the direct musical evolution of comedian Bill Hicks’ critique of media voyeurism. 

Released a decade after Hicks’ death, the song updates the comedians’ late-80s “television-as-heroin” analogy for the modern, high-definition digital age.

Hicks and Tool’s paths were frequently intertwined early in the band’s career. Hicks would even open for Tool on several of their Lollapalooza appearances in 1993.

Hicks argued that Americans sit paralyzed in front of televisions, consuming tragedy “the way junkies consume heroin”.

This parallels Maynard’s unsettling admission that…

He stares like a "zombie" into the TV, in search of more tragedy to entertain him. But what’s even more disconcerting is what comes next.

You – the listener – have now been implicated. You too “need” this kind of bleak entertainment to sustain yourself throughout the drudgery of your day-to-day. It’s a reminder that, no matter what you’re enduring, worse things are happening to other people. 

10,000 Days was recorded across three California studios between August and December 2005. 

10,000 days boils down to approximately 27 years – the number of years Maynard James Keenan's mother, Judith Marie, spent paralysed following a cerebral haemorrhage she suffered in 1976, when the frontman was just eleven years old.

She was a devout Southern Baptist. Her faith, by all accounts, only deepened after the haemorrhage.

Judith Marie died on June 18, 2003 at 59. Maynard scattered her ashes in his vineyard.

Two years later, 10,000 Days was recorded

“Vicarious” – a song about the human compulsion to watch other people suffer from a safe distance – is the opening track on an album written by a man who spent 27 years watching someone he loved suffer, unable to do anything about it.

Maynard had written explicitly about his mother before in “Judith”, released in 2000 by one of his other bands, A Perfect Circle.

The tone of “Judith” is angrier, blaming Jesus Christ, his mother’s “savior” for her pain:

But the emotion on Tool’s 10,000 Days is softer and more reflective. Judith Marie has since passed away. The record’s two-part centrepiece – “Wings for Marie” and “10,000 Days (Wings Pt. 2)” – is addressed directly to Maynard’s mother.

He believes that after 10,000 days of suffering, it’s time his mother was given her “wings”. He implores her to:

The two “Wings for Marie” songs channel Maynard’s inner turmoil after her death. 

In contrast, the opening track of that same album, “Vicarious”, is an outward expression of Maynard’s pain towards a world that treats tragedy as spectacle. 

Artist Alex Grey’s collaboration with Tool for 10,000 Days and the “Vicarious” music video were primarily inspired by a profound Ayahuasca experience.

During previous experiences with Ayahuasca and DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine, the isolated psychoactive chemical compound that’s found in Ayahuasca), the artist reported becoming a “spirit grid of light” and was looking at “turning jewel like forms that were inside of this wireframe spirit body”. 

This experience resulted in the cover art for his book Transfigurations.

His painting Collective Vision was also inspired by a DMT trip, which featured “heads linked together and eyes all beautifully arranged geometrically” in a dome, representing a shift from outer space to “inner space”.

The inspiration for the 10,000 Days artwork (and later, the “Vicarious” music video) was Grey’s Net of Being.

Net of Being was the result of an Ayahuasca trip in Brazil. 

Grey experienced a vision of a vast, interconnected space. He saw:

These faces were anthropomorphic (human-like), but “included the entire cosmos” and “went on infinitely” (ibid).

Within the vision, he was “flying through this space of these interconnected godheads which appeared “very jewelike” with faces like flames and grids through which one could see little galaxies spinning.

Grey notes that Tool guitarist Adam Jones was the one who recognized the beauty and oddness of this space in the Net of Being. 

Grey and Jones worked together to create a “computer animated fly through of the Net of Being” for the “Vicarious” video, as a way to bring his DMT/Ayahuasca visions into a “fully dimensionalized” format.

The animation functioned as a “journey through the net of being”, simulating the sensation Grey had during his Ayahuasca experience.

The heads featured “faces... like flames” and “grids” through which one could see “little galaxies spinning”.

So where do the lyrics connect back to Grey’s art? What resonated so deeply with Adam Jones that Net of Being became both the album artwork… and “Vicarious” the song?

Grey's artwork for the album depicts humanity as a network of interconnected consciousness… The attached eyeholes allow us to look into the band’s inner world.

In contrast to these visuals, the lyrics of “Vicarious” depict humanity as a network of interconnected voyeurs. 

They critique how we interact with the world through the “eyes” of the media which observes – and takes pleasure from – endless cycles of tragedy.

The “Vicarious” video is the intermediary that ties together this entire panopticon – the “prison” of Maynard’s inner grief is interrogated from within and from without.

20 years ago, a thirteen year old pressed his face into the eyes of Alex Grey’s artwork.

Waves of nausea washed over him as he experienced a simulation of the artist’s Ayahuasca trip.

The artwork wasn’t just simple “decoration” for the music. Alex Grey had worked closely with the band to find a place where their vision overlapped. His Net of Being imagines a cosmos of connected faces.

“Vicarious” imagines a similar network… but the faces aren't turned toward the divine. They’re turned toward the screen.

Eyes looking inward for a lost spiritual connection. 

Eyes looking outward at a never-ending loop of tragedy.

And the perverse joy found in both.

🤘 Horns up 🤘

Shane O'Neill
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media