One of the weirdest points of the Tool news cycle recently, has been the band's intersection with Justin Bieber and his wife, Hailey. Earlier this summer, Justin expressed his admiration for Tool's song "The Pot" and in typical Maynard fashion, he responded to a story about it on Twitter with a simple hashtag, "#bummer."
If you actually follow Tool, and understand Maynard's sense of humor, it seemed to me he was mocking "hashtag culture," and giving the response that people would expect him to have. I can't imagine he genuinely has any emotion for whether Bieber or anybody appreciates his music.
Tool drummer Danny Carey in fact has no problem with Bieber being a fan, or anybody else for that matter. A magazine clipping posted on the Tool subreddit poses to Carey the question of if Carey cared that Bieber was a fan of the band. "Absolutely not! Anybody who digs your art, you what to share it with. It's like trying to say you're God Almighty to try to judge somebody. We're not in the business of putting up barriers, that's the job of politicians. They're the idiots who want to build walls between people."
It's not hard to put together who Carey is referring to in the last passage, as U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been trying to build a wall at the south of the U.S. border, not to keep out Tool fans – but Mexicans! Not sure if this has been on the news or not, so I just wanted to make it clear. This is not the first time a member of Tool has spoken out against Trump. In 2016, Maynard compared Trump to the rise of Hitler.
