My Most Favoritest Song Ever: Flood by Tool

I was gonna talk about Tool’s Flood and the time I was sucked under a pile of logs on the Nooksack river–I guess that’s what I will talk about.
Listening to Toadies Rubberneck. Suppose I should have Tool’s Undertow on right now but Toadies is cool too.
Flood is about 4 minutes of a grinding, painful introduction followed by a moment of transition and revelation, continuing into an intense, increasingly complex and adrenaline fueled progressive rock masterpiece about a changing and twisting life perspective, surrounded in this metaphor where water is life, with one of the most epic endings you’ll ever hear.
“This ground is not the rock I thought it to be”
Tool’s Flood was like my most favoritest song for a long long time, possibly all the way up until Tool released Pneuma in 2019. I guess it kind of grew on me over the years. I drank the tool-aid in my freshman year in high school, introduced to them via Beavis and Butthead. I remember Sober was their first single and it didn’t do anything for me, but then they released Prison Sex which really captured my interest so I went out and bought the album and it didn’t really speak to me at first until I went to see them live up in Vancouver BC. This was the first time I’d been to a concert with music I’d already listened to. That show blew my mind. I did a bit of crowd surfing and remember falling on my ass a couple times deep in the mosh pit, with my shirt ripped nearly off my back and my adrenaline racing like I don’t think I’d ever felt before. And just the vibe in there. Like this super intense teen angst that was somehow also supportive, compassionate, and spiritual.
It’s been a lot of years since I’ve been in a mosh pit but I can still smell that awful beautiful overpowering stench of sweat and marijuana.
Life is fucking beautiful.
I also promised I’d talk about all the books I finish and I did just finish listening to A Liberated Mind and it was fantastic, but I don’t want to get off track.
I also just put on Undertow to bring me back, but I guess you don’t care about that.
AAAAAAnyway… so I was already a fan of Tool the summer after my freshman year in high school and I was inner tubing with my buddy who also became a huge tool fan… like “Name your first born son after their lead singer” kind of fan. So I was inner tubing and made a wrong turn and found myself being sucked under a huge pile of logs. The water forced me all the way to the bottom of the river. i remember my face hitting against the rocks before I floated back up thanks to my life jacket, then the logs above me and I realized I only had a few moments left to live and as cliche as it sounds, my life really did flash before my eyes and I thought of all the things I’d done and I realized I was really disappointed.
It all seemed so pointless.
But then the river spit me out the other side and I saw the blue sky and the trees and I got out of the water and shouted for my buddy and I remember the colors were so vibrant. Like the whole world was now more colorful and intense than it had been before. I laughed and laughed. Something about that moment was so intensely funny.
My life was never the same after that.
And over the years I would think about that day whenever I’d hear Flood. It’s like a metaphor for my life. The first four minutes and twenty seconds is just this grinding awful monotonous experience that just makes you question your life choices.
It’s like it’s just not really even a fun thing to listen to.
So how could I say that about my favorite song?
Cuz that first four minutes, just like the early part of my life, was boring, awful and painful, but necessary. You can’t just jump to four minutes in. The song just doesn’t work if you do that. Just like life doesn’t work if you skip the hardship or avoid the difficult things.
I can’t think of any other song I’ve ever heard that does anything like this.
Flood is one of those songs that people outside the Tool fandom just don’t get. You have to listen to it many times before you can truly understand it. For the first few years in my teens I think it may have been my least favorite Tool song because I just didn’t get it.
When their Aenima album first came out when I was a sophomore or junior I remember at first I was again disappointed by it but then listened to it a few more times and it rapidly grew on me until I was obsessed. I carried that album around in my discman CD player all day at school. That album had a bigger impact on me than any other by a big margin.
“Today a young man on acid realized we are all of one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death. Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
Of course, that’s Bill Hicks, a very mean and angry but also very insightful comedian who had recently died and they sampled. I heard those lines every day, multiple times during high school.
That Bill Hicks line of course I used in my book Daughter as the thing they say when someone dies, except they always modify it just a little bit so that each person gets slightly different words.
I wonder what my life would have been like if Tool had never released Aenima. I think I could have been a very different person.
I’m up to Undertow, the title track on the album and it reminds me of just how angry Tool used to be, just like me. Their early 2000’s stuff still had a lot of that old angst but was exploring some ways out. Then Fear Inoculum in 2019 after 13 years of waiting, was definitely worth the wait. I feel like we all grew together. The early stuff was about screaming about and working through your trauma and disgust at the immoral world and their newer stuff is more about building a better way of looking at things to avoid those problems for the next generation.
“Soon the water will come and claim what is mine I must leave it behind and climb to a new place now.”