Tool has unseated the Queen of queen divas off her lofty perch to claim the #1 spot on the Billboard album charts. This is reminiscent of when Nirvana’s Nevermind did this to Michael Jackson in January 1992. Given the state of rock music in the public consciousness right now, this feels significant.

This isn’t just any rock band that pulled this off. It’s not Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, The Beatles, or The Rolling Stones. A prog-metal band did this on an album where no song is shorter than ten minutes, and without one radio-friendly track on the album. There are long periods of time in Fear Inoculum where there are no vocals at all.

This would be like Rush unseating Justin Bieber ten years ago. For prog-bands that aren’t Pink Floyd, it’s almost unheard of. Fear Inoculum is the most unlikely major release to unseat a pop star as big as Taylor Swift. 

What makes this even more chuckle-worthy is all the Taylor Swift fans not knowing who Tool is, and expressing their outrage and puzzlement on social media over who these four old guys are who knocked their goddess off her throne. They know who Tool is now.

Wouldn’t it be great if a few Taylor Swift fans, out of raw curiosity about who ‘this band Tool’ is, decided to research them a little, and in the process, got turned on to their music? Or even Taylor herself? After all, we know Justin Bieber likes Tool.

I don’t know if Fear Inoculum will be able to maintain its #1 status, and I don’t know how much crossover appeal Tool has outside of the rock community and rabid Tool fan base, where they’re revered. Either way, for Tool fans, and for the band, this is memorable. Taylor Swift (and I’m guessing most of her fans) was quite young when Tool started making music, and hopefully, the success of Fear Inoculum will encourage the guys to keep on making music.

Given how different Tool’s music is from Taylor Swift’s, it could be argued that Tool’s #1 status doesn’t matter, that they’re two different worlds so unlike each other that they can coexist. However, pop music and hard rock music have always been at odds with one another. The cultural gulf between the two fan bases has been there for decades. Metallica fans in the ‘80s accused Metallica of selling out just for making their first music video for play on MTV. Fans of punk and metal have traditionally wanted nothing to do with mainstream radio and pop culture, preferring the grassroots approach that birthed those genres in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Maybe that gulf been bridged in our new politically-correct, “tolerant” culture, and maybe it’s contradictory or hypocritical for fans of a genre that is anti-mainstream to celebrate that one of their bands has achieved mainstream success. This is the same quandary that Nirvana found themselves in the early ‘90s, which Dave Grohl called “punk rock guilt”: when your favorite band achieves the same level of mainstream success as the artists you spent years mocking and criticizing.

Tool being put in this position, given their reputation, presents the same quandary. Tool is a band that lives off the beaten path, even by metal and hard rock standards. Their notoriously long songs, metaphysical subject matter, and bizarre music videos have built up a sense of mystery and mystique around them that leaves you either in love, or scratching your head. For Taylor Swift fans, it’s much more likely to be the latter. The contrast between Tool and Taylor Swift is glaring, and it’s one we haven’t seen front and center like this in quite awhile.

Tool and Taylor Swift

So it’s easy to say it doesn’t matter that Tool is #1 and Taylor Swift isn’t, but there is obviously a large group of music lovers who are buying Fear Inoculum, and it’s unlikely many of them are big Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber fans. So for this one moment in music history, the rock community is reminding everyone that they’re still here. That rock music is still important, even if only to them. They’re making their voice heard supporting a band that got their start in a 1990s decade where heavy rock music, alternative metal, and punk rock was a major cultural force, and maybe could be again.

Unlike almost all of their ‘90s contemporaries, Tool has endured the test of time far beyond the ‘90s, and are still relevant and more popular today than they’ve ever been, even after going 13 years without releasing any new music. They’ve earned this, and so it’s not unreasonable to allow their fans to celebrate. Not just for Tool, but for hard rock fans in general.