"All the art for Tool is done by the me and the band." -- Adam Jones
Adam Jones (born in Singapore in 1963) is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC, Canada. He is executive director of the nongovernmental organization Gendercide Watch. He was chosen as one of "Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide" for the book of that name, scheduled for publication in 2010.
"As far as the grunge thing, there are three bands from Seattle that I would call true grunge.""But if you want to be in a band and write music, then you should just be in a band and write music.""Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.""Doing the stereotypical solo bores me.""I have a record company starting. It's called Flesh Records and I'm putting together music for porno movies.""I haven't listened to much music lately; I've been out of it.""I listen to Helmet - and I love Helmet, they're a great band - but every song sounds the same.""I mean, Tool has a style, but we try to make all our songs sound different from each other.""I personally don't like to use as many effects because when you play live, something always goes wrong.""I played violin and got into that Suzuki program in the second grade.""I seriously do not think Nirvana is grunge.""I think people like Steve Vai are so boring.""I think putting labels on people is just an easy way of marketing something you don't understand.""I use Gibson guitars; I prefer the Les Paul custom.""I'm a bass player from way back and Paul is a guitar player and we've been in many bands.""I'm my own worst critic and I think everyone in the band is a perfectionist.""I'm not a geek about equipment, I just know what I like.""I'm not a good guitar player.""I'm not into solos, I'm into lyrics.""I've always dabbled on guitar, but never took lessons.""I've never worried about how long the song is.""If I play anything that sounds like a solo, it's gonna sound like a lyric.""If you become addicted and a junkie, well, that's your fault.""Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.""My approach is to be part of a band that makes music, not hit songs.""That's the thing I like about my sound. It's real raw and very unsafe compared to a solid state kind of sound.""That's what I love about our music - it'll never be a hit because you can't dance to it.""The Melvins are grunge.""We could have gone with much bigger labels and more money, but we wanted to go with a company that is LA based, all in the same building, and really understands what the artists want.""We have meetings with our record label to tell them how to market us.""We wanted to take as much time and effort making the video as we did the song.""We're more into expressing ourselves than making radio hits.""When we played with the Rollins Band, we'd keep songs going until we felt like ending it.""With four perfectionists in the band, we have a hard time reaching perfection."
Jones is best known for his work in comparative genocide studies. He is author of a leading textbook in the field, "Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction" (Routledge, 2nd edn. forthcoming 2010), and author or editor of numerous other works on genocide and crimes against humanity. From 2005-07, he was Associate Research Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He serves as senior book review editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, and has given talks and academic presentations on genocide at conferences and seminars in North and South America, Europe, and East Asia.
In addition to promoting a global-comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the field in his Genocide textbook, Jones has done influential work on genocide and gender (see below). He has also explored artistic and cultural representations of genocide, genocide and structural violence, and (with Nicholas A. Robins) subaltern genocide, or "genocides by the oppressed."
Jones is known for his distinctive approach to the study of gender and international relations. While supporting feminist claims for attention and intervention in the case of violence and discrimination against women and girls, he has called for greater attention to the plight of battle-aged civilian males, who are regularly targeted for gendercide by genocidal perpetrators. In 1999, Jones co-founded the Web-based nongovernmental organization Gendercide Watch with Carla Bergman and Nate Haken, aimed at "confront[ing] gender-selective atrocities against men and women worldwide." His essays on gender, violence, and international politics are compiled in Gender Inclusive: Essays on Violence, Men, and Feminist International Relations (Routledge, 2009).
Jones's research at the Master's and Ph.D. levels focused on mass media and processes of democratization and political transition. His study of the transformations at the Sandinista newspaper Barricada in Nicaragua was published as Beyond the Barricades: Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979-1998 (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), and his doctoral dissertation as The Press in Transition: A Comparative Study of Nicaragua, South Africa, Jordan, and Russia (Deutsches Übersee-Institut, 2002).
Jones has lived or travelled in nearly seventy countries on every populated continent. Much of his travel photography and photojournalism is available under a Creative Commons license on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. His first book of travel photography, Latin American Portraits, appeared with The Key Publishing House Inc. in 2008.
