The metal band Kurt Cobain called “shameless ripoffs”

Kurt Cobain was never one to censor his opinion all that often. Even at the expense of his own band, Cobain could be particularly vicious when it came to talking about anything that he saw as disingenuous, from artists that took themselves way too seriously to critiquing his album Nevermind for being nothing but a watered-down version of what he knew they were capable of. Outside of his personal tastes, art and music often went hand-in-hand, and when he saw the first Tool video, he wasn’t particularly impressed with what he saw.

By the time the heavy metal juggernauts got the ball rolling, though, they were already at the forefront of a major change in rock and roll. Since grunge had killed off every hair metal band in existence, it ended up messing up other great bands by design. Now, unless your name was Metallica, it was hard for any metal act to get a foothold, but Tool were a bit of a different breed.

They still had all the hallmarks of a metal band on their debut Undertow, but there was a bit of an alternative slant to it. The band had developed an artsy style and a few progressive tendencies along the way, and getting a cosign from someone like Henry Rollins probably didn’t hurt either.

When it came time for them to release a video, Tool would not show their faces. Instead of making the typical performance video that everyone else was doing, Adam Jones concocted a stop motion animation video ripped straight out of a nightmare for their song ‘Sober’. While the sight of stick figurines and puppets doesn’t seem like the most daunting thing in the world, watching them being laid out and put through these torturous positions looks absolutely horrifying in context.

Or at least, that’s what the original was supposed to be. While Tool had that aesthetic down to a science, Cobain only saw them cribbing their ideas from The Brothers Quay on their short stop-motion videos. While Cobain wanted something in the vein of their puppeteer style of filmmaking for the video for ‘Lithium’, he thought Tool made a mockery of what they did.

Given how closely ‘Sober’ paralleled their style, Cobain hoped that The Brothers Quay pursued legal action, telling MTV, “Oh God, I hope they get sued! It is such a ripoff, it’s a shameless ripoff! I mean, I wanted a Brothers Quay style, but I didn’t want anything like that. That was terrible! They should be slapped on the wrist for that!”

While Nirvana eventually used live footage for the video for ‘Lithium’, the rest of their music video catalogue saw them getting more artsy, including the amazing shots in ‘Heart Shaped Box’. Tool eventually moved away from that style of animation as well, with Jones putting in other imaginings for the videos for songs like ‘Schism’ and ‘Stinkfist’.

Whether or not Tool actually managed to rip off The Brothers Quay intentionally is one thing, but the lion’s share of their music wasn’t about trying to retread the same metal influences that came before. They were about expanding people’s minds to what metal was capable of, and once they hit albums like Lateralus, fans knew they had crossed a creative threshold.