Music
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For years rock music has had the label of being the senseless rants of angry white people. Most people who do not take the time to really listen to the lyrics of these songs pass them off as songs about hate, drugs or the troubles the artist has had in the past. The truth could not be farther from this. Many of the songs written by today’s top rock groups are songs with deep seeded meanings that are lost on the uninformed public. One band that has commonly been misunderstood is “Tool”. For years they have been writing songs, which without careful interpretation, are pointless to listen to. One of their most famous songs, “The Pot”, has unfortunately been commonly thought to be about marijuana and other drugs. In reality the song is about Maynard James Keenan’s, the writer of the song, distaste toward hypocrisy. When carefully studied the song is revealed to be Maynard James Keenan’s attack on people who live on double standard or a “pot”, as the title alludes to, calling the kettle black.
Within the first line of the song it is understood that he accusing hypocrites of having no right in holding themselves above others. When Keenan writes “Who are you to wave your finger? / You must have been out your head” he is addressing the hypocrite and asking him how he could accuse someone and think that he was any better. Keenan continues by writing “Eyehole deep in muddy waters / You practically raise the dead”. This is a metaphor for how a hypocrite will always be up to his eyes in trouble, due to how he puts on a faД§ade of greatness. “Practically raise the dead” refers to how a person who lives their lives in such a way will eventually think of themselves on par with god and even think they can “raise the dead”. “Rob the grave to snow the cradle” is an analogy for how this person acquired all of his wealth in corrupt ways in order to shower his home, or “cradle”, with his, so called, power. Then the hypocrite will attempt to cover his wrong doings by deciding to “burn the evidence down”. Keenan compares the hypocrite to a “Soapbox house of cards and glass”, because he preaches as if he is better than everyone else, yet the base on which his points rest are as sturdy as a house of cards and will shatter just as easily as a glass house. This parallelism is continued with the line “So dont go tossin your stones around”, stating that if the hypocrite decides build a glass house to live in, surrounding himself in a fragile fortress, he should at least be smart enough not to throw stones, or accusations, at people on the outside of his house because in doing so he would shatter his “house of … glass” and expose his own flaws.
The chorus of this song tends to be the most misunderstood part. The line “You mustve been high” coupled with the title, “The Pot”, tend to make people assume that the song must be talking about drugs, but if one were to follow the themes preceding the chorus it would make a lot more sense. “You mustve been high” is obviously a statement about how the hypocrite must have thought so highly of himself to actually believe that he was better than everyone else without meriting the respect.
“Foot in mouth and head up ass” are two commonly used analogies for calling a person a fraud. Keenan claims that it is difficult to show someone how hypocritical he is unless he pulls his foot out of his mouth through the lines “Difficult to dance вЂ?round this one / вЂ?Til you pull it out, boy”. The song reiterates the earlier characteristic of the hypocrite to “Rob the grave to snow the cradle” but in different worked saying “Steal, borrow, reaper, savior / Shady inference”. In other words, the difference between right and wrong is presented here; opposite sides of the spectrum, reaper and savior, are given the attributes stealer and borrower, respectively. A hypocrite will always steal others character and work and claim it as his own while a decent person will only borrow it and attribute credit to the people who deserve it.
Keenan then brings in historical comparison in the line “Kangaroo done hung the juror with the innocent”. A kangaroo court or kangaroo trial is a charade of a legal