“Prison Sex” by Tool

"Prison Sex" was the first single from Undertow, Tool's 1993 debut album on Zoo Entertainment, and it's every bit as queasy and heavy as the title warns. Maynard James Keenan wrote the words and sings them, Adam Jones plays guitar, Paul D'Amour bass and Danny Carey drums, and all four share the writing credit. Sylvia Massy produced it with the band and engineered, and Ron Saint Germain mixed. The song sits in a modified drop-D tuning with the low string pulled down to B, and it ends on a deliberate anticlimax, the hooks giving way to a hushed coda that has nothing to do with what came before.

Jones, whose resume included animation work on the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, directed a stop-motion video, cut by Ken Andrews, that MTV yanked from its playlist as too disturbing. It still drew a Best Special Effects nomination at the 1994 Video Music Awards.

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