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About This Track
The eighth track from Tool's fourth album '10,000 Days', released in April 2006, 'Rosetta Stoned' runs past eleven minutes and centres on a hallucinogenic encounter outside Area 51. The narrator, high on DMT and other substances, describes a visitation by an alien being who declares him the chosen one tasked with delivering a message of hope and warning. The lyrics catalogue the experience in frantic, comic detail: a flaming banana-shaped craft, an extraterrestrial resembling a blue-green Jackie Chan, attempts to calm down with orange slices and fetal spooning. Maynard James Keenan adopts the voice of someone spiralling through a drug-induced vision, the prose littered with pop-culture references (E.T., The Matrix, L. Ron Hubbard) and mounting panic about whether he'll ever come down. The song's structure mirrors the disorientation, moving through complex, fast-to-slow drum patterns that shift the ground beneath the narrative. What emerges is both a parody of alien-abduction testimony and a portrait of someone grappling with the gap between cosmic revelation and their own perceived inadequacy, the chosen messenger who didn't even graduate high school.
"Rosetta Stoned" is a track by Tool, released 2nd May 2006. Full lyrics are available below. Dork has published 2 articles about Tool.
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