The Grudge by Tool: Time to turn your grudges into gold

‘The Grudge’ is an amazing song from ‘Tool’. It’s just amazing. The lyrics prove again that Maynard James Keenan is a true genius. They say that music is the highest level of enlightenment and Maynard surely comes close in that regard. I see an absolutely charming and charismatic philosopher in Maynard James Keenan.

The Grudge is a simple and direct song. But the depth of the song is enormous. You can extract a lot from that. The song is about the grudges we all hold inside of us. It is about the grudges that we deliberately keep inside, and also the latent grudges that we are not aware of.

At the beginning of the song, Maynard asks us to embrace our grudges. The song tells us to carefully calculate the things we should tolerate and the things we shouldn’t tolerate. Maynard basically ignites the instinctive urge between us to control everything. It is an impulse that we all carry within us consciously or unconsciously. In fact, he tells us to use our grudges as a weapon. He tells us to control everything by using our grudge as an effective instrument. It’s Maynard’s way of preaching that you have to embrace your negative side to bring out the positives. But the fun part is that Maynard actually put this whole beginning into the reverse psychology wrapper. He reveals it in the final half of the song.

Maynard references Saturn in this song. In fact, he puts a lot of emphasis on his reference to Saturn. In Greek mythology, Saturn was the god of all gods. But Saturn was so selfish and insecure that he ate all of his children because he feared that they had overthrown him. However, Saturn made a serious mistake. He did not take Zeus into account. And finally, it was Zeus who rose up against Saturn, dethroned him and killed him in the process. The relationship of the story to this song is that Saturn held and embraced the grudge within him and applied it almost rightly enough. But what Saturn was unaware of was the damage that had been done to him intrinsically. He only found out when Zeus put him to death, but it was too late. And there goes the message of the song.

After proving his point of the grudge wound, Maynard asks us to let him go at the end. He urges us to transmute our lead grudges into gold.

I will interpret it as an alternative way of telling us to transform our greatest weakness into our greatest strength.